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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.

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Speaker 2: This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Holds on

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Speaker 2: Bloomberg Radio.

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Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have a fascinating guest.

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Speaker 1: His name is Brian Klass. He teaches at the University

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Speaker 1: College London, where he focuses on global politics, and he

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Speaker 1: has written a book that I have just plowed through

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Speaker 1: the first half of and found absolutely fascinating, Fluke, Chance,

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Speaker 1: Chaos and Why Everything we do Matters. He just really

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Speaker 1: explains why our understanding of cause and effect is so

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Speaker 1: flawed that we think that A naturally leads to B,

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Speaker 1: which leads to C, and instead the world is far

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Speaker 1: more random and complex, and little things that happened years ago,

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Speaker 1: sometimes thousands or millions of years ago, have a giant

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Speaker 1: impact on what happens today. It really turns your view

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Speaker 1: on causation upside down and it makes you rethink just

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Speaker 1: how random everything is. I found the book fascinating and

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Speaker 1: I found our conversation fascinating, and I think you will

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Speaker 1: also with no further ado, my conversation with the author

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Speaker 1: of Luke, Brian Klass.

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Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me

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Speaker 2: on the show.

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Speaker 1: So this book is nothing more than just all confirmation

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Speaker 1: biased for me. We'll jump into this in a bit.

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Speaker 1: I'm about halfway through it and really really enjoying it.

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Speaker 1: But I have to start out with a story you

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Speaker 1: tell in the introduction to the book. You're twenty years old.

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Speaker 1: Your father pulls you aside, shows you a newspaper clipping

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Speaker 1: from nineteen o five and the headline is terrible act

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Speaker 1: of insane woman. Tell us about that woman, Clara Magdalene Jansen,

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Speaker 1: and what she did.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, so this story is from a place called Keeler, Wisconsin,

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Speaker 2: a little rural farmhouse in nineteen oh five, and she's

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Speaker 2: got four young children, and she probably has what we

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Speaker 2: would determine as postpart and depression, but of course they

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Speaker 2: don't know what that is in nineteen oh five, and

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Speaker 2: she has a mental breakdown, and so she ends up

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Speaker 2: tragically killing all of her kids and then taking her

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Speaker 2: own life. And her husband comes home to the farmhouse

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Speaker 2: and finds his whole family dead, and you could just

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Speaker 2: imagine the horror of this. And the reason I put

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Speaker 2: this in the introduction to Fluke is because this is

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Speaker 2: my great grandfather's first wife, and so one of the

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Speaker 2: things that was really extraordinary for me was that I

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Speaker 2: went through my first twenty odd years of life not

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Speaker 2: knowing about this dark chapter in my family history. But

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Speaker 2: after I saw this newspaper headline, you know, sort of

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Speaker 2: get over the shock of knowing this about your own family.

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Speaker 2: But then you realize that you don't exist unless this

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Speaker 2: had happened to me, right, so you wouldn't be listening

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Speaker 2: to my voice unless these children had died.

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Speaker 1: So following that tragedy, your grandfather moves on with his

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Speaker 1: life exactly, eventually remarries the woman who becomes Greg, your

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Speaker 1: great grandmother. So but for this random horrible events, we're

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Speaker 1: not here having this conversation exactly.

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Speaker 2: And this is where, you know, this is why I

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Speaker 2: started getting interested in applying things like chaos theory to

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Speaker 2: human society and also to our own lives, because, of course,

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Speaker 2: you know, Clara, when she decided to do this horrible

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Speaker 2: thing to her children and also take her own life,

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Speaker 2: she had no way of knowing that one hundred and

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Speaker 2: nineteen years later, you know, you and I would be

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Speaker 2: talking on Bloomberg. But that's that's the way it is, right,

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Speaker 2: That's the way the world works. And so I think

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Speaker 2: this is the kind of stuff where we tend to

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Speaker 2: imagine that there's just sort of these you know, big

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Speaker 2: building blocks of life, like the really obvious variables that

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Speaker 2: create outcomes. And the argument I'm making is, actually, you know,

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Speaker 2: it's it's sort of heretical to the you know, look

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Speaker 2: for the signal, not the noise, because I am a

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Speaker 2: byproduct of the noise.

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Speaker 1: So so the rational cause and effect A leads to

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Speaker 1: be are. So that's one individual, and obviously one individual

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Speaker 1: can change a future set of bloodlines. Let's take this

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Speaker 1: a little bigger. Let's talk about mister and missus Stimpson

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Speaker 1: who go on vacation in Coyota, Japan in nineteen twenty six.

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Speaker 1: How significant can that vacation? Possibly big?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, So this is a couple, mister and missus hl Stimpson.

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Speaker 2: They go to Kyoto, Japan on a holiday, on a

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Speaker 2: vacation in nineteen twenty six, and they just fall in

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Speaker 2: love with the city. It's an experience that a lot

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Speaker 2: of us have where you go on vacation, you get

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Speaker 2: a soft spot for wherever you've gone to relax and

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Speaker 2: so on, and they just find it utterly charming. Now,

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Speaker 2: nineteen years later, this turns out to matter quite a

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Speaker 2: lot because the husband and the couple. Henry Stimpson ends

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Speaker 2: up as America's Secretary of War and the Target Committee

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Speaker 2: approaches him with their recommendations of where to drop the

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Speaker 2: first atomic bomb in nineteen forty five, and top of

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Speaker 2: the list unequivocal Kyoto.

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Speaker 1: Now he's not Tokyo, which has already been demolished.

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Speaker 2: Tokyo's basically been destroyed. There's an argument here that Kyoto's

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Speaker 2: just opened up a warplane factory. It's a former imperial capital,

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Speaker 2: so it has sort of propaganda value for, you know,

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Speaker 2: reducing Japanese morales. So all the generals say, look, this

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Speaker 2: is a good idea, this is where we should drop

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Speaker 2: the bomb, and you know, Stimson basically springs to action

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Speaker 2: because they the generals started calling it his pet city

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Speaker 2: because he kept talking about it, and he twice met

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Speaker 2: with President Truman in person, we have records of the

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Speaker 2: meetings and so on, and basically said you have to

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Speaker 2: take this off the list, and eventually Truman relents, and

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Speaker 2: so the first bomb gets dropped on Hiroshima instead. Now

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Speaker 2: the second bomb is supposed to go to a place

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Speaker 2: called Kokura, and as the bomber gets to Kokura, there's

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Speaker 2: briefly cloud cover, and they don't want to accidentally drop

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Speaker 2: the bomb somewhere that's not the city, because of course

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Speaker 2: that would not have the same effect. So they decide

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Speaker 2: to go to the secondary target, which is Nagasaki.

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Speaker 1: They literally do a loop to see, hey, maybe it

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Speaker 1: clears up, it doesn't, yeah, and onto Nagasak exactly.

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Speaker 2: They actually, I think, do loops until they're running low

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Speaker 2: on fuel and they're starting to think, okay, we're not

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Speaker 2: going to make it to the secondary target, so they finally,

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Speaker 2: you know, pull the plug on Kokura, dropped the bomb

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Speaker 2: on Nagasaki. So hundreds of thousands of people live or

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Speaker 2: die in these in these cities based on a nineteen

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Speaker 2: year old vacation and a cloud. And the point that

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Speaker 2: I think is important to realize here is that, you know,

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Speaker 2: if you were modeling this, if you're trying to say, like,

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Speaker 2: how is the US government going to determine where to

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Speaker 2: drop the atomic bomb? You would not put in your

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Speaker 2: model the vacation histories of American government officials or like

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Speaker 2: cloud cover, right, you would come up with these very

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Speaker 2: obvious big things like where are the places that have

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Speaker 2: strategic importance or propaganda value, And if you did that,

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Speaker 2: you probably would put Kyoto on top of the list,

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Speaker 2: and you get the wrong answer. And you wouldn't get

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Speaker 2: the wrong answer because you were stupid. You'd get the

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Speaker 2: wrong answer because sometimes things that don't seem to be

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Speaker 2: important actually end up being the most important factor in

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Speaker 2: an outcome.

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Speaker 1: And the Japanese actually have an expression Kokura's luck. Tell

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Speaker 1: us what that means to the Japanese.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is a very useful thing to

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Speaker 2: think about. It's Kokura's luck refers to when you unknowingly

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Speaker 2: escape disaster. So it was a long time before the

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Speaker 2: US government acknowledged that they were planning to drop the

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Speaker 2: bomb on Kokura. So you know, hundreds of thousands of

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Speaker 2: people in that city had no idea there was an

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Speaker 2: airplane over them that, but for a cloud, would have

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Speaker 2: incinerated the entire city and killed most of them. And

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Speaker 2: so I think this is the kind of thing where,

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Speaker 2: you know, one of the ideas that is central to

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Speaker 2: the argument in Fluke is that these sorts of things,

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Speaker 2: this Kokura's luck, is happening to us all the time, right,

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Speaker 2: we were completely oblivious to the diversions in our lives

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Speaker 2: and our societies, the alternative possible history simply because we

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Speaker 2: can only experience one reality. And what we do is

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Speaker 2: we've then stitch a narrative back where it's A to B.

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Speaker 2: This makes complete sense. Here are the five reasons why

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Speaker 2: this happened. And in fact, I think this is a

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Speaker 2: way that we end up deluding ourselves into a neater

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Speaker 2: and tidier version of the real world.

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Speaker 1: So you describe why we can't know what matters most

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Speaker 1: because we can't see the alternative universes. I love this quote.

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Speaker 1: We ignore the invisible pivots, the moments that we will

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Speaker 1: never realize we're consequential, the near misses and near hits

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Speaker 1: that are unknown to us because we've never seen and

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Speaker 1: will never see, our alternative possible lives. That's really very

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Speaker 1: chilling to know that we're just walking through life unaware

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Speaker 1: that hey, atomic bomb over our head. Better hope the

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Speaker 1: clouds don't clear up.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. I have this saying that I refer to a

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Speaker 2: lot in the book, which is that we control nothing,

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Speaker 2: but we influence everything. And this is when you think

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Speaker 2: about this in our own lives. I think this is

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Speaker 2: something where you realize that there are these diversions happening constantly.

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Speaker 2: There's a film in the nineteen nineties with Gwyneth Peltrow

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Speaker 2: called Sliding Doors, and it has this idea and I

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Speaker 2: sort of riff on that with this concept I coined

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Speaker 2: called the snooze button effect, where you imagine that you

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Speaker 2: know it's Tuesday morning, you're a little bit groggy, you

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Speaker 2: wake up, the snooze button beckons to you, you slap it,

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Speaker 2: and you get delayed by five minutes. You imagine you're

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Speaker 2: now your life rewinds by thirty seconds and you say,

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Speaker 2: uh no, I won't hit the snooze button. I'll get

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Speaker 2: out of bed. Now. I think that has changed your life. Now,

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Speaker 2: the question is how much has it change your life?

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Speaker 2: And under some short time scales, maybe things sort of

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Speaker 2: get ironed out in the end. But you're gonna have

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Speaker 2: different conversations that day, You're gonna talk to different people,

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Speaker 2: you might get in a car accident in some days, right.

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Speaker 2: I mean, these are the kinds of things that we

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Speaker 2: sort of are oblivious to, and I think when you

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Speaker 2: think about them. With social change, it's happening all the

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Speaker 2: time too. I mean, there's just so many ways that

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Speaker 2: the world could have unfolded differently, but for a few

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Speaker 2: small changes. I mean, you know, you think about even

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Speaker 2: like nine to eleven. We think about all the variables

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Speaker 2: that go into nine to eleven. One of them that

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Speaker 2: people don't talk about was the weather. It was an

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Speaker 2: incredibly blue, blue sky day, Chris. Yeah, and if you

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Speaker 2: had if you had a you know, very very cloudy

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Speaker 2: day or storm, some of the planes wouldn't have taken

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Speaker 2: off on time. They might have had a chance to

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Speaker 2: foil some of the plots. Or if you had had

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Speaker 2: a different slate of passengers on flight ninety three, So

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Speaker 2: if it had gone September tenth or September twelfth, maybe

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Speaker 2: those passengers don't take down the plane, Maybe the White

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Speaker 2: House or the capital's destroyed, and then the world's different.

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Speaker 2: I mean, you know, can you imagine how it would

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Speaker 2: change America or geopolitics if there was no White House anymore?

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Speaker 2: So I think these are the kinds of things where,

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Speaker 2: you know, you just imagine that there's this straight line

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Speaker 2: of cause and effect, and of course when we experience

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Speaker 2: the world, we then explain it. But you know, these

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Speaker 2: small changes could really reshape the future. Some of them

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Speaker 2: are going to be more consequential, like that Kyoto story,

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Speaker 2: others are going to, you know, be a little bit

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Speaker 2: less consequential, at least on human time scales. But the

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Speaker 2: point is we can't know, and I think that's something

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Speaker 2: that is bewildering to think about.

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Speaker 1: So can we actually identify cause and effect? We tell

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Speaker 1: ourselves stories. We have not only narrative fallacy in everything

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Speaker 1: we do because we love a good plot line, but

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Speaker 1: there's also hindsight by us where we imagine, oh, I

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Speaker 1: knew this was coming all along, and you know, can

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Speaker 1: we really truly know the impact of what how a

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Speaker 1: leads to be or how something that we think is

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Speaker 1: completely meaningless actually has deep significance.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, So I very much subscribe to this view that

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Speaker 2: all models are wrong, but some are useful. I don't

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Speaker 2: think X yes exactly, But I think that one of

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Speaker 2: the things that has been lost on us is I

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Speaker 2: think there's so much of the world that runs on

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Speaker 2: models that we sometimes forget that they are extremely simplified

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Speaker 2: abstractions of reality and that we actually don't understand how

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Speaker 2: the causation works. And I think that creates hubrist that's dangerous. So,

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Speaker 2: you know, when you think about why the atomic bomb

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Speaker 2: ended up getting dropped on Hiroshima. There are an infinite

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Speaker 2: number of causes, and they're things that we would not

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Speaker 2: think about. Right. Geological forces for gen uranium millions of

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Speaker 2: years ago is part of that story. Einstein being born

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Speaker 2: is part of that story. The Battle of Midway pivoting

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Speaker 2: on a fluke event where the US wins because they

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Speaker 2: just happen to stumble upon the Japanese fleet at the

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Speaker 2: right moment, right. I mean, if any of these things

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Speaker 2: have been different, there's like there's an almost infinite number

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Speaker 2: of them where little tweak would have been different, a

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Speaker 2: different outcome would have happened. Now, for the useful navigation

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Speaker 2: of society, we have to simplify reality because we can't

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Speaker 2: build a model that has nine hundred thousand variables, right,

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Speaker 2: So what you instead do is you sort of say, Okay,

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Speaker 2: this is a crude version of reality. And I think, like,

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Speaker 2: you know, one of the things that is really useful

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Speaker 2: about some models, like Google Maps, for example, we know

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Speaker 2: that's not the world, right, we know the map is

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Speaker 2: not the territory. You look at Google Maps and you're

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Speaker 2: not like, oh, well, I imagine that that's what the

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Speaker 2: real world looks like. It's a clear abstraction. I think

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Speaker 2: when we start to get into forecasting and other modeling

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Speaker 2: of social ties change, I think we lose sight of

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Speaker 2: the fact that we have a Google Maps distortion and

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Speaker 2: that we're actually looking at something that is potentially useful

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Speaker 2: to navigate but is very, very different from the real world.

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Speaker 1: Huh. Really interesting. So let's talk about the way different

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Speaker 1: schools of thought perceive and manage these philosophical differences. You

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Speaker 1: point out Eastern and Western thinking have a very different

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Speaker 1: set of precepts because of just the nature of each society.

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Speaker 1: In the Bible, in Genesis, God proclaims, let us make

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Speaker 1: man in our image after our likeness, and let them

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Speaker 1: have dominion over the fishes, the foul of the cattle, etc.

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Speaker 1: Eastern culture takes a whole lot more of a collectivist approach,

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Speaker 1: where you're part of a group, not you were made

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Speaker 1: in God's images. Tell us a little bit about how

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Speaker 1: this schism developed and what is the relationship of chaos

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Speaker 1: theory to.

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Speaker 2: Each Yeah, so this is a speculative theory, but it's

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Speaker 2: a theory that suggests that the reason why Eastern cultures

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Speaker 2: have much more relational concepts of interconnectivity between humans and

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Speaker 2: the rest of the world and human society as well,

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Speaker 2: is derived from the differences or proximity, rather that humans

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Speaker 2: have to primates, for example, in their own cultures. So

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Speaker 2: there's lots of monkey gods and so on, and there's

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Speaker 2: also course lots of monkeys in many of these cultures

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Speaker 2: that are developing. And the idea is that the hypothesis

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Speaker 2: is that this meant that people could not avoid the

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Speaker 2: commonality that we have with the rest of the world. Right,

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Speaker 2: whereas if you think about like biblical societies, if you

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Speaker 2: look at animals and you see camels, you think like, hey,

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Speaker 2: we are super different. We are separate from the rest

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Speaker 2: of the world. So the argument is that over the

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Speaker 2: long stretch of civilization that this created a slightly different

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Speaker 2: mentality that then manifests in what was called relational versus

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Speaker 2: atomistic thinking, and Western society is atomistic thinking on steroids,

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Speaker 2: which is to say, you know, I mean the American

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Speaker 2: dream is very atomistic individualist. It's like, you know, if

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Speaker 2: you just want to succeed, then you have to do everything,

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Speaker 2: whereas the relational concepts are much more about the interconnections

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Speaker 2: that people have. And so I think that also tells

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Speaker 2: you how you think about society right. Social change is

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Speaker 2: either driven by individuals or's driven by systems. And I

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Speaker 2: think that there is a way in which Western culture,

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Speaker 2: I think, can learn to actually appreciate some of the

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Speaker 2: complexity of social change more with a healthy, increased dose

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Speaker 2: of relational thinking.

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Speaker 1: And you kind of bring the Eastern and Western philosophies

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Speaker 1: together where you discuss the overview effects. And it really

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Speaker 1: begins with the United States. Western society sends astronauts to

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Speaker 1: the moon, sends astronauts around around the Earth. And these

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Speaker 1: astronauts are chosen out of off and out of the military,

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Speaker 1: out of the Air Force. They're pilots, their logical they're

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Speaker 1: unfeel they're supposed to be essentially soldiers, and yet all

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Speaker 1: of them have this impact when they see the blue,

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Speaker 1: green Earth in its entirety from space. They all describe

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Speaker 1: it as being overwhelmed by a life shattering epiphany on

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Speaker 1: the interconnection of everything. That doesn't sound very Western, that

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Speaker 1: sounds more like an Eastern philosophy. But this has been

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Speaker 1: time and time again. Lots of astronauts have had this.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, there's you know, there's funny because there's been like

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Speaker 2: nine five hundred generations of modern humans, and four hundred

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Speaker 2: and ninety seven of them have not seen the earth, right,

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Speaker 2: So when people do see the earth, they have this

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Speaker 2: profound epiphany. And as you say, you know, they're worried

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Speaker 2: about sending up you know, philosophers and poets, because they

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Speaker 2: figured they'd be overwhelmed by the sort of existential awe

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Speaker 2: and like, you know, would forget to hit the right

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Speaker 2: buttons or whatever. So they pick these people who are

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Speaker 2: supposed to be robots effectively in their personality, and all

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Speaker 2: of them still have this incredible sort of epiphany about

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Speaker 2: the interconnection of the world because you look at the

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Speaker 2: single planet and you think, okay, this is one structure.

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Speaker 2: This is not something where I'm this distinct bit. You're like,

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Speaker 2: this is all together right now. I think what's really

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Speaker 2: striking about that is that those world views do shape

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Speaker 2: your thinking around social change. And I think when you

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Speaker 2: start to think that you are in control rather than

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Speaker 2: an agent of influence, you have a different worldview. When

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Speaker 2: you start to think that you're individual rather relational, you

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Speaker 2: have a different worldview. And all these things feed into

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Speaker 2: the ways that we set up models that we sort

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Speaker 2: of interact with our conceptions of social change. And so on,

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Speaker 2: and also the degree to which we have hubris that

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Speaker 2: we can control things. And I think this is where

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Speaker 2: the danger comes in. Right, It's not that you shouldn't model,

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Speaker 2: It's not that you shouldn't have abstractions of systems. It's

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Speaker 2: that when you start to get hubristic about it and

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Speaker 2: think you have top down individualists control, you start to

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Speaker 2: get overconfident in ways that you try to tame something

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Speaker 2: that I think is untamable. And this is where we

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Speaker 2: get shocks more often, because you try to impose this

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Speaker 2: sort of control on a system that is so complex

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Speaker 2: that it resists control. And so you know, there's some

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Speaker 2: of these things where I think the insights the flawosophy

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Speaker 2: behind this it's it's sort of lurking there invisibly, where

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Speaker 2: no one says this when they build a model, but

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Speaker 2: it's it's obviously shaping the way they think about it

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Speaker 2: and their sort of assumptions before they go into trying

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Speaker 2: to determine how to navigate risk and uncertainty.

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Speaker 1: Along those lines, you have a great quote in the book.

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Speaker 1: God may have created the clock, but it was Newton's

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Speaker 1: laws that kept it ticking. So so how do you

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Speaker 1: resolve that inherent tension between big forces driving things or

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Speaker 1: random elements affecting it, or is there no resolving them.

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Speaker 1: They both matter.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, So I think it's a question of time scales,

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Speaker 2: and I think one of the big one of the

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Speaker 2: big problems. And this is something that I you know,

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Speaker 2: it's always it's it's such a nuanced concept that it's

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Speaker 2: sometimes difficult to explain. But I think there's a really

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Speaker 2: important point about whether ideas that happen for a long

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Speaker 2: time seem to be validated by what goes on the

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Speaker 2: patterns that we see, right, whether you can actually falsify

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Speaker 2: a theory when you're talking about social change. So my

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Speaker 2: favorite example of this is the Arab Spring in political science,

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Speaker 2: my own realm, there is a lot of stuff written

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Speaker 2: in sort of two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine,

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Speaker 2: even into twenty ten that says, here's why Middle Eastern

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Speaker 2: dictatorships are extremely resilient, and there's all this data showing

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Speaker 2: this the longevity, et cetera, et cetera, and then like

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Speaker 2: within six months of some of these books coming out,

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Speaker 2: you know, all of them are on fire. I mean,

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Speaker 2: I saw a political risk map when I was in

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Speaker 2: grad school where like every single country that was on

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Speaker 2: fire was green on the political risk map from the

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Speaker 2: previous year. Right now, There's two ways of thinking about that.

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Speaker 2: The first way is to say the theory has been falsified.

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Speaker 2: They were wrong, right. The second way of thinking about is,

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Speaker 2: hold on, maybe the world changed, Maybe the patterns of

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Speaker 2: cause and effect have actually shifted, right. And I think

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Speaker 2: this is something that people don't appreciate that much, is

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Speaker 2: they assume that the patterns of the past are going

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Speaker 2: to be predictive of the patterns of the future. I mean,

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Speaker 2: David Hume came up with this idea hundreds of years ago,

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Speaker 2: but it is something that I think is particularly important

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Speaker 2: for our world because the patterns of the past being

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Speaker 2: indicative of the patterns of the future has ever before

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Speaker 2: been as flawed of an assumption, because our world is

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Speaker 2: changing faster than ever before. So I think one of

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Speaker 2: the issues that we have is when we think about

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Speaker 2: these sort of clockwork models where we say, oh, yes,

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Speaker 2: you know, these are the ways that things have worked

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Speaker 2: in the past. Our world is very very different year

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Speaker 2: to year, and that didn't used to happen. I mean

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Speaker 2: I was talking before about these you know, nine thou

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Speaker 2: five hundred generations of humans. If you think about the

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Speaker 2: sort of entirety of human history as a twenty four

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Speaker 2: hour day, twenty three hours and like ten minutes is

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Speaker 2: hunter gatherer period, right, and then you get into farming,

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Speaker 2: which is another like thirty minutes, and then you've got,

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Speaker 2: you know, a few minutes for the industrial revolution, and

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Speaker 2: you get to the information age, which we're in now,

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Speaker 2: which is like eleven seconds right in this in this

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Speaker 2: one day o'clock. And I think the point that's important

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Speaker 2: here is that if we base almost all of our

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Speaker 2: decision making and almost all of our models on causal

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Speaker 2: inference from past patterns of behavior, but the world is

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Speaker 2: changing year to year, then the assumptions we're making are

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Speaker 2: becoming more and more short lived. And I think that's

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Speaker 2: where we're embedding risk into are thinking, because we have

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Speaker 2: no other way of inferring cause and effect other than

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Speaker 2: past patterns. There's no alternative. That's what Hume says. He's like,

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Speaker 2: this is the only way we can understand the world

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Speaker 2: is to look at what happened in the past. We

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Speaker 2: can't look into the future. So I think this is

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Speaker 2: something that I do worry about when I see a

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Speaker 2: lot of decision making built on this sort of mentality

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Speaker 2: of the clockwork model that like, oh, yes, well, it's

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Speaker 2: just going to keep ticking along. And you know, there's

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Speaker 2: a lot of very smart thinkers who have thought about

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Speaker 2: black swans and so on. I just think that we've

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Speaker 2: made a system where the black swans are actually going

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Speaker 2: to be more frequent. I think we've designed a system

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Speaker 2: that's more prone to systemic risks than before.

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Speaker 1: Especially given not only does information move fast than ever,

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Speaker 1: but we're more interconnected, we're more related, and it becomes

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Speaker 1: increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to figure out what are

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Speaker 1: the unanticipated results, consequences, side effects of anything that we do.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is you know, this is one of

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Speaker 2: those things where I think there's some there's some pretty

432
00:20:56,600 --> 00:20:59,520
Speaker 2: good examples from history of when somebody tries to control

433
00:20:59,560 --> 00:21:03,159
Speaker 2: a system that is uncontrollable and it backfires catastrophically. And

434
00:21:03,160 --> 00:21:06,600
Speaker 2: my favorite example is ihouldn't say favorite is horrible tragedy.

435
00:21:06,440 --> 00:21:09,760
Speaker 2: But the best illustration of this is Mao has this

436
00:21:09,880 --> 00:21:12,280
Speaker 2: idea in communist China. He has this idea. He says,

437
00:21:12,320 --> 00:21:14,600
Speaker 2: I'm we're gonna eradicate disease, and the way we're gonna do.

438
00:21:14,640 --> 00:21:17,080
Speaker 2: This is massive four pests campaigns, so we're gonna kill

439
00:21:17,080 --> 00:21:20,719
Speaker 2: all these pests. So he basically tells everyone just go

440
00:21:20,760 --> 00:21:23,639
Speaker 2: out and you know, kill all these various things that

441
00:21:23,640 --> 00:21:26,800
Speaker 2: potentially are vectors of disease. And what it ultimately does,

442
00:21:26,840 --> 00:21:29,119
Speaker 2: it leads to one of the worst famines in human

443
00:21:29,160 --> 00:21:33,080
Speaker 2: history because they've disrupted the ecosystem, and they figure, oh,

444
00:21:33,200 --> 00:21:34,520
Speaker 2: you know, as long as we just get rid of

445
00:21:34,520 --> 00:21:36,439
Speaker 2: these pests, it will be fine. What they actually have

446
00:21:36,520 --> 00:21:38,840
Speaker 2: done is they've made it to the crops fail and

447
00:21:38,920 --> 00:21:40,680
Speaker 2: so you know, this is the kind of stuff where

448
00:21:40,720 --> 00:21:44,159
Speaker 2: I think that's the it's the parable that warns us of,

449
00:21:44,400 --> 00:21:47,720
Speaker 2: you know, assuming that simply because we have either have

450
00:21:47,800 --> 00:21:50,040
Speaker 2: had some success in the past, or because our model

451
00:21:50,080 --> 00:21:52,360
Speaker 2: seems to guide us in this way, that we can

452
00:21:52,440 --> 00:21:55,440
Speaker 2: therefore insert ourselves into a system and not worry about

453
00:21:55,440 --> 00:21:57,760
Speaker 2: the unintended consequences. I think that's the kind of thing where,

454
00:21:57,960 --> 00:21:59,000
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of the people who are the

455
00:21:59,040 --> 00:22:01,120
Speaker 2: dumers in AI are talking about this. There are some

456
00:22:01,160 --> 00:22:05,200
Speaker 2: things where you know, when you have AI based decision making,

457
00:22:05,280 --> 00:22:07,800
Speaker 2: it is you know, the training data is the past.

458
00:22:08,160 --> 00:22:10,080
Speaker 2: So there are some things that I think are are

459
00:22:10,080 --> 00:22:13,000
Speaker 2: getting worse in this front, and we are also, as

460
00:22:13,000 --> 00:22:16,320
Speaker 2: you said, the interconnectivity. I mean, one of my favorite

461
00:22:16,359 --> 00:22:18,240
Speaker 2: examples of this is the Suez Canal boat. That the

462
00:22:18,280 --> 00:22:20,399
Speaker 2: infamous Suez Canal boat, right. I mean, you have a

463
00:22:20,440 --> 00:22:23,560
Speaker 2: gust of wind that hits a boat and twists its sideways,

464
00:22:23,560 --> 00:22:25,960
Speaker 2: it gets lodged in the canal, and the best estimate

465
00:22:26,000 --> 00:22:28,359
Speaker 2: I've seen is that it created fifty four billion dollars

466
00:22:28,359 --> 00:22:29,840
Speaker 2: of economic damage. And they said it was you know,

467
00:22:29,880 --> 00:22:31,919
Speaker 2: something like point two to point four percent of global

468
00:22:31,920 --> 00:22:35,320
Speaker 2: GDP could have been wiped off by this this one boat.

469
00:22:35,480 --> 00:22:38,200
Speaker 2: Now the question is is there ever another moment in

470
00:22:38,280 --> 00:22:41,159
Speaker 2: human history where one boat could do that? Right? And

471
00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:43,639
Speaker 2: I think the answer is quite clearly no. So the

472
00:22:43,920 --> 00:22:46,000
Speaker 2: I mean maybe the one that brought the plague, right, right,

473
00:22:46,800 --> 00:22:48,240
Speaker 2: But I mean this is the kind of stuff where

474
00:22:48,280 --> 00:22:49,840
Speaker 2: I think one of the one of the lessons that

475
00:22:49,920 --> 00:22:52,840
Speaker 2: I think is important is that there's a trade off

476
00:22:53,280 --> 00:22:56,800
Speaker 2: very often between optimization and resilience. And I think, you know,

477
00:22:56,840 --> 00:23:00,240
Speaker 2: we're told all the time efficiency and optimization are are,

478
00:23:00,520 --> 00:23:03,560
Speaker 2: you know, the guiding principles of so many of our systems,

479
00:23:04,040 --> 00:23:06,600
Speaker 2: but they come at a cost. They do create less resilience,

480
00:23:06,600 --> 00:23:09,600
Speaker 2: and I think there are some things where the long

481
00:23:09,720 --> 00:23:12,399
Speaker 2: term planning that we can do is to put a

482
00:23:12,400 --> 00:23:14,320
Speaker 2: little bit more into resilience and a little bit less

483
00:23:14,359 --> 00:23:16,600
Speaker 2: in optimization. It will cost us money in the short term,

484
00:23:16,720 --> 00:23:18,119
Speaker 2: but it will probably save us a hell of a

485
00:23:18,119 --> 00:23:19,440
Speaker 2: lot of money in the long term. Huh.

486
00:23:19,480 --> 00:23:23,280
Speaker 1: Really really interesting. So I found the book fascinating and

487
00:23:23,359 --> 00:23:27,919
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed where you go down the evolutionary biology

488
00:23:28,560 --> 00:23:33,840
Speaker 1: rabbit hole, starting with convergence is the everything happens for

489
00:23:33,920 --> 00:23:39,840
Speaker 1: a reason school of evolutionary biology. Contingency is the the

490
00:23:39,920 --> 00:23:43,840
Speaker 1: g rated version is stuff happens theory. Explain the difference

491
00:23:43,880 --> 00:23:44,520
Speaker 1: between the two.

492
00:23:45,240 --> 00:23:48,120
Speaker 2: Yes, So I think that evolutionary biology has a lot

493
00:23:48,160 --> 00:23:50,840
Speaker 2: to teach us about understanding change. It's a historical science

494
00:23:50,840 --> 00:23:53,200
Speaker 2: and they're trying to understand, you know, the origin story

495
00:23:53,200 --> 00:23:56,320
Speaker 2: of species, and they're thinking about cause and effect, just

496
00:23:56,359 --> 00:23:59,480
Speaker 2: as people in economics and politics are as well. And

497
00:23:59,520 --> 00:24:02,240
Speaker 2: so these two ideas they're very simple to understand with

498
00:24:02,280 --> 00:24:05,240
Speaker 2: two examples. The first example of contingency is the asteroid

499
00:24:05,280 --> 00:24:08,640
Speaker 2: that wipes out the dinosaurs. Now, if this asteroid, which

500
00:24:08,680 --> 00:24:11,280
Speaker 2: was by the way, was produced by an oscillation in

501
00:24:11,320 --> 00:24:13,359
Speaker 2: a place called the ort cloud in the distant reaches

502
00:24:13,400 --> 00:24:14,200
Speaker 2: of space.

503
00:24:14,320 --> 00:24:20,320
Speaker 1: Absolute outer ring of assorted Detrius that surrounds the entire

504
00:24:20,400 --> 00:24:22,400
Speaker 1: Solar System beyond Pluto.

505
00:24:22,520 --> 00:24:26,280
Speaker 2: Yeah. So this oscillation flings this space rock towards Earth

506
00:24:26,800 --> 00:24:30,119
Speaker 2: and it hits in the most destructive way possible. It

507
00:24:30,200 --> 00:24:31,960
Speaker 2: hits in the ocean in a way that brings up

508
00:24:32,000 --> 00:24:35,360
Speaker 2: a lot of toxic gas and effectively incinerates the dinosaurs

509
00:24:35,400 --> 00:24:37,520
Speaker 2: because the surface temperature went up to about the same

510
00:24:37,560 --> 00:24:40,119
Speaker 2: level as a broiled chicken. I mean, it was deadly

511
00:24:40,240 --> 00:24:42,639
Speaker 2: right now. The reason this is important is because if

512
00:24:42,640 --> 00:24:44,360
Speaker 2: it had hit a slightly different place on the Earth,

513
00:24:44,400 --> 00:24:45,840
Speaker 2: the dinosaurs probably went to died out.

514
00:24:46,040 --> 00:24:48,560
Speaker 1: And let me just point out, and you mentioned this

515
00:24:48,640 --> 00:24:50,439
Speaker 1: in the book. It's not like if it hits a

516
00:24:50,480 --> 00:24:56,200
Speaker 1: different continent five seconds earlier, five seconds later, it completely

517
00:24:56,280 --> 00:25:00,480
Speaker 1: misses that sulfur rich if miss at the in the

518
00:25:00,560 --> 00:25:02,639
Speaker 1: Yucatan Peninsula.

519
00:25:02,840 --> 00:25:04,720
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I mean, you know, this is the kind

520
00:25:04,760 --> 00:25:06,960
Speaker 2: of stuff where you think about it and it is

521
00:25:07,240 --> 00:25:10,880
Speaker 2: very unsettling because you can imagine everything that humans have done, right,

522
00:25:11,200 --> 00:25:13,240
Speaker 2: I mean, you have a second difference in this asteroid.

523
00:25:13,240 --> 00:25:16,359
Speaker 2: There's no humans because the extinction of the dinosaurs is

524
00:25:16,359 --> 00:25:18,359
Speaker 2: what led to the rise of mammals and eventually the

525
00:25:18,359 --> 00:25:21,400
Speaker 2: evolution of us. And so this is contingency. It's where

526
00:25:21,440 --> 00:25:25,520
Speaker 2: this small change could radically reshape the future. Now, convergence

527
00:25:25,640 --> 00:25:28,399
Speaker 2: is the alternative hypothesis, and they both exist, right, the

528
00:25:28,520 --> 00:25:31,960
Speaker 2: sort of order and disorder and convergence says, Okay, yeah,

529
00:25:32,000 --> 00:25:33,840
Speaker 2: there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of fluctuations

530
00:25:33,840 --> 00:25:38,240
Speaker 2: and flukes, but eventually things that work win, right. So

531
00:25:38,520 --> 00:25:40,680
Speaker 2: my favorite example of this is that if you look

532
00:25:40,720 --> 00:25:42,600
Speaker 2: at if you were to take out a human eye

533
00:25:43,040 --> 00:25:44,600
Speaker 2: and you were to look at it and you were

534
00:25:44,600 --> 00:25:47,320
Speaker 2: to compare it next to an octopus's eye, they're actually

535
00:25:47,400 --> 00:25:50,600
Speaker 2: extremely similar, which is bizarre because there's about six hundred

536
00:25:50,600 --> 00:25:54,560
Speaker 2: million years of separate evolutionary pathways for the two branches

537
00:25:54,600 --> 00:25:57,800
Speaker 2: of life. And the reason this happened isn't because you know,

538
00:25:57,840 --> 00:26:00,760
Speaker 2: we just got super lucky. It's because solution came up

539
00:26:00,800 --> 00:26:04,600
Speaker 2: with a strategy by random experimentation that simply worked. It

540
00:26:04,680 --> 00:26:07,960
Speaker 2: made the species navigate the world effectively long enough to

541
00:26:08,000 --> 00:26:10,680
Speaker 2: survive to have offspring, which is the engine of evolution. Right.

542
00:26:11,040 --> 00:26:13,320
Speaker 2: So this is the kind of stuff where yeah, there

543
00:26:13,359 --> 00:26:15,760
Speaker 2: was like a lot of very profound differences. I mean,

544
00:26:15,760 --> 00:26:17,880
Speaker 2: we do not look like octopus, thank goodness, but it's

545
00:26:17,880 --> 00:26:19,840
Speaker 2: something where as a result of that, the I is

546
00:26:19,880 --> 00:26:23,040
Speaker 2: basically the same. And so the question here, I think

547
00:26:23,200 --> 00:26:26,439
Speaker 2: is can we apply these frameworks to our own change,

548
00:26:26,520 --> 00:26:28,560
Speaker 2: right in our own societies? And so what I try

549
00:26:28,600 --> 00:26:30,560
Speaker 2: to say is, Okay, there's some stuff that is ordered.

550
00:26:30,560 --> 00:26:33,520
Speaker 2: There's lots of regularity, there's lots of patterns in our lives.

551
00:26:33,920 --> 00:26:36,119
Speaker 2: That's the convergence stuff. At some point, you know, you

552
00:26:36,160 --> 00:26:38,639
Speaker 2: go on the highway, there might be an accident sometimes,

553
00:26:38,960 --> 00:26:41,200
Speaker 2: but like most of the time, you know, the cars

554
00:26:41,400 --> 00:26:44,920
Speaker 2: drive around the same speed, they have space between them

555
00:26:44,920 --> 00:26:47,679
Speaker 2: that's about the same distance, right, And like there's all

556
00:26:47,680 --> 00:26:50,000
Speaker 2: these patterns, but every so often there's a car accident,

557
00:26:50,000 --> 00:26:51,760
Speaker 2: and that's contingency. Right. So this is the kind of

558
00:26:51,800 --> 00:26:54,560
Speaker 2: stuff where what I say is that the way that

559
00:26:54,600 --> 00:26:57,800
Speaker 2: social change happens and also our lives unfold is what

560
00:26:57,840 --> 00:27:00,960
Speaker 2: I call contingent convergence. Not the most beautiful phrase, but

561
00:27:01,000 --> 00:27:03,760
Speaker 2: it's I think very accurate and saying, okay, so there's

562
00:27:03,800 --> 00:27:06,840
Speaker 2: these contingencies that change the path you're on, and then

563
00:27:06,880 --> 00:27:10,040
Speaker 2: once you're on that path, the sort of forces of

564
00:27:10,160 --> 00:27:13,320
Speaker 2: order do constrain the outcomes that are possible. They say, look,

565
00:27:13,359 --> 00:27:15,359
Speaker 2: this stuff's gonna work. That stuff's not gonna work, and

566
00:27:15,400 --> 00:27:19,280
Speaker 2: the sort of survivors bias produces the stuff that does work.

567
00:27:19,480 --> 00:27:21,880
Speaker 2: So I think this is a useful framework that I'm

568
00:27:21,920 --> 00:27:26,280
Speaker 2: borrowing from evolutionary biology to help us better understand social change.

569
00:27:26,280 --> 00:27:31,600
Speaker 1: So before I get to contingent convergence, I wanna stay

570
00:27:31,640 --> 00:27:36,320
Speaker 1: with the difference between contingents, which is the meteor killing

571
00:27:36,320 --> 00:27:40,720
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs and allowing the mammals derive to rise, and convergence.

572
00:27:40,960 --> 00:27:43,720
Speaker 1: A couple of other examples that you give in the

573
00:27:43,720 --> 00:27:50,119
Speaker 1: Book of Convergence. Crab like bodies keep evolving time and

574
00:27:50,160 --> 00:27:55,120
Speaker 1: again there are five separate instances that that shape somehow

575
00:27:55,160 --> 00:27:59,960
Speaker 1: seems to provide a useful adaptive way to navigating the world.

576
00:28:00,400 --> 00:28:01,760
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is I mean, this is one of

577
00:28:01,760 --> 00:28:04,159
Speaker 2: those things where evolutionary biologists joke about that and they

578
00:28:04,200 --> 00:28:06,240
Speaker 2: always say, you know, eventually we're gonna have pincers, like

579
00:28:06,280 --> 00:28:08,960
Speaker 2: we're all gonna end up as crabs because like evolution,

580
00:28:09,119 --> 00:28:11,000
Speaker 2: if you know, and some of them say, if there

581
00:28:11,040 --> 00:28:13,000
Speaker 2: is a god, he really likes crabs.

582
00:28:12,800 --> 00:28:14,919
Speaker 1: And this is there is actually I actually heard that

583
00:28:14,920 --> 00:28:18,800
Speaker 1: about beetles, but there's actually a word for this. Carsonization

584
00:28:19,200 --> 00:28:23,000
Speaker 1: is the process of evolving towards a crab like shape.

585
00:28:23,760 --> 00:28:27,200
Speaker 1: Similarly flight. I never thought about this until I read

586
00:28:27,240 --> 00:28:30,400
Speaker 1: it in the book Flight Evolve four separate times. It's insects,

587
00:28:30,760 --> 00:28:35,280
Speaker 1: it's bats, it's birds, and it's terosaurs. That that's amazing.

588
00:28:35,600 --> 00:28:37,199
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this is the stuff where you know,

589
00:28:37,480 --> 00:28:41,400
Speaker 2: evolution is the It's a really powerful lesson of the

590
00:28:41,480 --> 00:28:45,720
Speaker 2: value of undirected experimentation because every strange thing that we

591
00:28:45,760 --> 00:28:48,800
Speaker 2: see around us, every you know, organism, every plant, et cetera,

592
00:28:49,200 --> 00:28:53,160
Speaker 2: is just the byproduct of this undirected experimentation navigating uncertainty, right,

593
00:28:53,160 --> 00:28:54,920
Speaker 2: I mean that the world is changing all the time.

594
00:28:55,120 --> 00:28:57,760
Speaker 2: It's different concentrations of oxygen. They sometimes have to be

595
00:28:57,760 --> 00:28:59,320
Speaker 2: in the ocean, sometimes I have to be on land,

596
00:28:59,680 --> 00:29:02,400
Speaker 2: and you know, this sort of diverse array of life

597
00:29:02,440 --> 00:29:05,440
Speaker 2: is just undirected experimentation. But the thing is that these

598
00:29:05,480 --> 00:29:08,600
Speaker 2: do these these forces do end up constraining the possibilities.

599
00:29:08,600 --> 00:29:11,360
Speaker 2: Now when we talk about carsonization, is really interesting thing

600
00:29:11,360 --> 00:29:12,880
Speaker 2: that I don't go into much depth in the book,

601
00:29:12,880 --> 00:29:14,760
Speaker 2: but it's called the Burgess shale up in Canada, and

602
00:29:14,800 --> 00:29:18,600
Speaker 2: the Canadian Rockies, And it's basically like this, this like

603
00:29:19,120 --> 00:29:22,960
Speaker 2: fossilized museum of all these really wild body plans that

604
00:29:23,080 --> 00:29:25,160
Speaker 2: used to exist hundreds of millions of years ago before

605
00:29:25,160 --> 00:29:28,040
Speaker 2: a mass extinction event, and what happened is they all

606
00:29:28,040 --> 00:29:31,360
Speaker 2: got obliterated. So you can't have any sort of convergence

607
00:29:31,360 --> 00:29:34,120
Speaker 2: from those body plans because they don't exist anymore, whereas

608
00:29:34,120 --> 00:29:37,000
Speaker 2: the ones that survived all of us are derived from them. Right,

609
00:29:37,240 --> 00:29:40,440
Speaker 2: So the contingency is like, okay, which body plans exist,

610
00:29:40,600 --> 00:29:42,560
Speaker 2: which which sort of ways could you set up life,

611
00:29:42,600 --> 00:29:44,719
Speaker 2: you know, with spines or not spines, whatever it is.

612
00:29:45,320 --> 00:29:47,800
Speaker 2: And then once you have that contingent event where there's

613
00:29:47,840 --> 00:29:51,240
Speaker 2: the extinction within that, there's this sort of constrained evolution

614
00:29:51,320 --> 00:29:54,600
Speaker 2: that is, okay, well, when this happens, the animal dies,

615
00:29:54,960 --> 00:29:57,400
Speaker 2: so it doesn't exist very long. And when this happens,

616
00:29:57,400 --> 00:29:59,320
Speaker 2: the animal survives, so it does exist. And this is

617
00:29:59,320 --> 00:30:01,840
Speaker 2: where arsonization, you know, you need to have a term

618
00:30:01,880 --> 00:30:04,400
Speaker 2: because the crabs are very much survivors.

619
00:30:05,720 --> 00:30:07,680
Speaker 1: And it turns out that unless you were on the

620
00:30:07,680 --> 00:30:11,280
Speaker 1: other side of the planet from where the meteor hit,

621
00:30:11,760 --> 00:30:14,920
Speaker 1: if you're a borrower, if you get underground, you could

622
00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:18,960
Speaker 1: survive that those fires in that heat and then come

623
00:30:19,000 --> 00:30:22,200
Speaker 1: out and continue the evolutionary process. Yeah.

624
00:30:22,200 --> 00:30:23,920
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the thing I find this really

625
00:30:24,200 --> 00:30:27,160
Speaker 2: fascinating to think about, but also unsettling, is that you know,

626
00:30:27,360 --> 00:30:30,960
Speaker 2: all all the life that exists now is basically offspring

627
00:30:31,200 --> 00:30:34,040
Speaker 2: of either something that could dig when the asteroid hit

628
00:30:34,440 --> 00:30:36,560
Speaker 2: or that lived in the ocean, and that's it, right,

629
00:30:36,600 --> 00:30:39,720
Speaker 2: because everything else died now. The really strange thing to

630
00:30:39,760 --> 00:30:41,440
Speaker 2: think about as well is that, you know, I told

631
00:30:41,440 --> 00:30:44,120
Speaker 2: the story about my great grandfather's first wife, and then

632
00:30:44,240 --> 00:30:46,520
Speaker 2: there's this murder and so on. But you keep tracing

633
00:30:46,560 --> 00:30:49,479
Speaker 2: these things back, right, So my great grandfather's ancestors had

634
00:30:49,520 --> 00:30:51,440
Speaker 2: to meet in just the right way and their great grandfather,

635
00:30:51,520 --> 00:30:53,320
Speaker 2: you know, they had to meet. But you go back

636
00:30:53,360 --> 00:30:55,840
Speaker 2: then six million years, this chimpanzee like creature had to

637
00:30:55,840 --> 00:30:58,400
Speaker 2: meet another chimpanzee like creature, and the two of them

638
00:30:58,440 --> 00:31:01,280
Speaker 2: mating is part of the story of human existence. You

639
00:31:01,320 --> 00:31:03,440
Speaker 2: go back further, you know, there's a worm like creature

640
00:31:03,520 --> 00:31:06,040
Speaker 2: hundreds of millions of years ago, it dies, we probably

641
00:31:06,040 --> 00:31:08,360
Speaker 2: don't exist. Or my favorite example I think in the

642
00:31:08,360 --> 00:31:11,640
Speaker 2: book is, and this is a finding from modern science

643
00:31:11,640 --> 00:31:14,640
Speaker 2: about a year ago, was they found out that the

644
00:31:14,680 --> 00:31:18,160
Speaker 2: reason why mammals don't lay eggs, right, why we don't

645
00:31:18,200 --> 00:31:21,400
Speaker 2: have eggs and we instead have live births, is they believed,

646
00:31:21,440 --> 00:31:24,760
Speaker 2: based on genetic testing, that a single shrew like creature

647
00:31:24,800 --> 00:31:27,280
Speaker 2: got infected by a virus one hundred million years ago,

648
00:31:27,560 --> 00:31:30,320
Speaker 2: which caused a mutation, which led to placenta and the

649
00:31:30,400 --> 00:31:32,760
Speaker 2: rise of mammals. And you think of I mean, to me,

650
00:31:32,880 --> 00:31:36,280
Speaker 2: that is just so utterly bizarre to imagine that our existence,

651
00:31:36,320 --> 00:31:39,040
Speaker 2: like everything in humans, you know, ancient Rome, all this stuff,

652
00:31:39,040 --> 00:31:41,000
Speaker 2: you know, Donald Trump, whatever it is, all of it

653
00:31:41,080 --> 00:31:43,600
Speaker 2: is completely contingent on a shrew like creature one hundred

654
00:31:43,640 --> 00:31:46,440
Speaker 2: million years ago getting sick. He's like, when you think

655
00:31:46,440 --> 00:31:48,560
Speaker 2: about this stuff, I think evolutionary biology tell you know,

656
00:31:48,560 --> 00:31:51,400
Speaker 2: they have encountered black swans throughout hundreds of millions of years.

657
00:31:51,440 --> 00:31:54,440
Speaker 2: It's basically the origin story of complex life.

658
00:31:54,480 --> 00:31:57,520
Speaker 1: So let's talk about one of those black swans and

659
00:31:58,200 --> 00:32:04,000
Speaker 1: the specific concept of contingent convergence. I love the example

660
00:32:04,080 --> 00:32:08,280
Speaker 1: you use of the long term evolution experiment using E

661
00:32:08,480 --> 00:32:17,479
Speaker 1: coli twelve identical flasks of ecoli and in separate separate environment.

662
00:32:17,640 --> 00:32:22,680
Speaker 1: Separate but identical environments run ten million years worth of

663
00:32:22,720 --> 00:32:25,680
Speaker 1: human evolution through it. What's the results of that?

664
00:32:25,880 --> 00:32:28,920
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one, this one. Making ecoli sexy in a

665
00:32:28,920 --> 00:32:31,160
Speaker 2: book is pretty hard, I must say, but I think

666
00:32:31,200 --> 00:32:33,600
Speaker 2: this is such a powerful lesson for change, so I

667
00:32:33,880 --> 00:32:35,720
Speaker 2: had to include it. I flew out to Michigan State

668
00:32:36,080 --> 00:32:38,640
Speaker 2: to meet with the people running the Long term Evolution Experiment,

669
00:32:38,680 --> 00:32:41,120
Speaker 2: and the simple idea they had, the genius idea, was

670
00:32:41,120 --> 00:32:44,360
Speaker 2: they said, let's see what happens if we take twelve

671
00:32:44,400 --> 00:32:48,200
Speaker 2: identical populations of ecoli, so they're genetically identical, we put

672
00:32:48,200 --> 00:32:52,160
Speaker 2: them in twelve flasks, and we just evolve them for decades. Right,

673
00:32:52,240 --> 00:32:55,120
Speaker 2: And because ecoi life cycles are so short, it's basically

674
00:32:55,120 --> 00:32:57,440
Speaker 2: the equivalent of millions of years of human evolution.

675
00:32:57,280 --> 00:33:01,080
Speaker 1: Like multiple life spans a day exactly, general per day exactly.

676
00:33:01,120 --> 00:33:02,600
Speaker 2: So it's like it's the equivalent of it if you

677
00:33:02,680 --> 00:33:06,600
Speaker 2: went through like great great great grandparents each day. Right now,

678
00:33:06,640 --> 00:33:08,800
Speaker 2: the beauty of the experiment is they controlled everything. So

679
00:33:08,840 --> 00:33:12,760
Speaker 2: there's nothing in these flasks except for a glucose and

680
00:33:12,840 --> 00:33:16,000
Speaker 2: citrate mix because the glucose is food for the ecoi

681
00:33:16,040 --> 00:33:19,040
Speaker 2: and the citrate is like a stabilizer. Okay, now what

682
00:33:19,160 --> 00:33:22,000
Speaker 2: happens is. They figured, okay, let's test contingents to your convergence.

683
00:33:22,360 --> 00:33:24,320
Speaker 2: And for like the first fifteen years or so of

684
00:33:24,360 --> 00:33:28,160
Speaker 2: the experiment, the lesson was, okay, it's it's convergence. Because

685
00:33:28,280 --> 00:33:31,000
Speaker 2: all twelve of the lines were evolving in slightly different ways.

686
00:33:31,040 --> 00:33:33,360
Speaker 2: There's noise, right, there's little differences. The genome is not

687
00:33:33,360 --> 00:33:37,480
Speaker 2: the same. But they're basically all getting fitter at eating glucose,

688
00:33:37,520 --> 00:33:40,960
Speaker 2: so they're getting better at surviving. And then one day

689
00:33:41,040 --> 00:33:44,200
Speaker 2: a researcher comes in and one of the flasks is cloudy,

690
00:33:44,320 --> 00:33:45,960
Speaker 2: and this is not supposed to be the way it is.

691
00:33:46,000 --> 00:33:47,320
Speaker 2: It looks like a little bit of milk has been

692
00:33:47,400 --> 00:33:50,280
Speaker 2: dropped into it instead of this really clear substance that

693
00:33:50,320 --> 00:33:52,480
Speaker 2: the rest of the other eleven are. So they sort

694
00:33:52,520 --> 00:33:54,360
Speaker 2: of think, oh, this is a mistake. Can they throw

695
00:33:54,360 --> 00:33:57,240
Speaker 2: it out? They restart because they frozen the equali so

696
00:33:57,240 --> 00:33:58,160
Speaker 2: they can restart.

697
00:33:57,920 --> 00:34:01,280
Speaker 1: Raise it like the equivalent of every five hundred years. Yeah,

698
00:34:01,600 --> 00:34:04,080
Speaker 1: so they could reset the clock anytime they want, exactly

699
00:34:04,400 --> 00:34:05,480
Speaker 1: twelve flass.

700
00:34:05,200 --> 00:34:06,960
Speaker 2: Yes, so they're all frozen. They all this sort of

701
00:34:06,960 --> 00:34:09,080
Speaker 2: fossil record. They can restart it at any point, So

702
00:34:09,080 --> 00:34:11,719
Speaker 2: they restart the experiment in this flask, just backing up

703
00:34:11,719 --> 00:34:13,839
Speaker 2: a little bit, and about two weeks later, I think

704
00:34:13,880 --> 00:34:17,319
Speaker 2: it is something like that, the flask trends cloudy again,

705
00:34:17,600 --> 00:34:19,279
Speaker 2: and like, okay, this was not an accident. There's something

706
00:34:19,320 --> 00:34:21,680
Speaker 2: going on here. So they actually pay to sequence the genome.

707
00:34:21,760 --> 00:34:24,319
Speaker 2: Very expensive at the time, a lot cheaper today, but

708
00:34:24,840 --> 00:34:27,960
Speaker 2: they paid a sequence it and the amazing finding. And

709
00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:29,560
Speaker 2: this is the thing. When I read this, I was like,

710
00:34:29,600 --> 00:34:32,960
Speaker 2: this is a central way of capturing. My idea is

711
00:34:33,320 --> 00:34:36,600
Speaker 2: that when they looked at the genome, there were four

712
00:34:36,840 --> 00:34:40,160
Speaker 2: totally random mutations that did not matter at all for

713
00:34:40,280 --> 00:34:44,360
Speaker 2: the survivability of the ecoli that proceeded in just the

714
00:34:44,440 --> 00:34:47,759
Speaker 2: right chain. That when the fifth mutation happened, all of

715
00:34:47,800 --> 00:34:50,799
Speaker 2: a sudden, that population could now eat the citrate, which

716
00:34:50,880 --> 00:34:52,920
Speaker 2: was not supposed to happen, right. It was supposed to

717
00:34:52,920 --> 00:34:55,200
Speaker 2: only eat the glucose. The citrate was there as a stabilizer.

718
00:34:55,719 --> 00:34:58,120
Speaker 2: But as a result of this, they became way more fit,

719
00:34:58,239 --> 00:35:01,279
Speaker 2: way more survivable than the other populations because they could

720
00:35:01,280 --> 00:35:04,399
Speaker 2: eat something the others couldn't. Right, And what happened then

721
00:35:04,480 --> 00:35:06,600
Speaker 2: is that since then, this has now been going on

722
00:35:06,680 --> 00:35:10,240
Speaker 2: for twenty plus years or so, since then, the citrate

723
00:35:10,280 --> 00:35:13,520
Speaker 2: population has an advantage over all of the other eleven,

724
00:35:13,560 --> 00:35:15,600
Speaker 2: and none of the others have developed that mutation because

725
00:35:15,600 --> 00:35:17,040
Speaker 2: it's sort of like a house of cards. You had

726
00:35:17,040 --> 00:35:21,040
Speaker 2: to have these exact four accidents in exactly the right order.

727
00:35:21,080 --> 00:35:22,720
Speaker 2: If they'd reach if they changed the order, it once't

728
00:35:22,680 --> 00:35:24,560
Speaker 2: have happened. And then they had to find me. On

729
00:35:24,600 --> 00:35:26,480
Speaker 2: top of that those four accidents, they had to have

730
00:35:26,520 --> 00:35:28,800
Speaker 2: the fifth accident, which gives them the ability to eat sitratee.

731
00:35:29,200 --> 00:35:31,880
Speaker 2: And so this is the idea of contingent convergence. Right.

732
00:35:31,880 --> 00:35:34,680
Speaker 2: It's like for that population that evolved the ability to

733
00:35:34,719 --> 00:35:39,840
Speaker 2: eat sitrade, that one mutation has changed everything forever. It

734
00:35:39,840 --> 00:35:41,879
Speaker 2: will never go back to eating glucose the same way

735
00:35:41,880 --> 00:35:45,120
Speaker 2: as the others. But for the others that didn't develop

736
00:35:45,200 --> 00:35:48,759
Speaker 2: that change, they are all still evolving in relatively predictable ways.

737
00:35:48,800 --> 00:35:51,960
Speaker 2: So I think this is the capturing of the of

738
00:35:52,000 --> 00:35:54,719
Speaker 2: the sort of paradox of our lives is that we

739
00:35:55,160 --> 00:35:59,120
Speaker 2: exist somewhere between order and disorder. Complete disorder would destroy humans,

740
00:35:59,360 --> 00:36:02,640
Speaker 2: we couldn't exist to our society's confunction. Complete order also

741
00:36:02,680 --> 00:36:05,240
Speaker 2: wouldn't work because there'd be no change, there'd be no innovation,

742
00:36:05,320 --> 00:36:07,080
Speaker 2: and so on and so I think this is where

743
00:36:07,120 --> 00:36:10,120
Speaker 2: contingent convergence really really shines. But I will admit that

744
00:36:10,440 --> 00:36:12,200
Speaker 2: trying to do a sound bite version of the long

745
00:36:12,280 --> 00:36:15,320
Speaker 2: term evolution experiment is something that in writing the book

746
00:36:15,880 --> 00:36:18,800
Speaker 2: was probably the greatest challenge of making something about bacteria interesting.

747
00:36:18,960 --> 00:36:21,319
Speaker 1: But it's really fascinating because if you stop and think

748
00:36:21,360 --> 00:36:24,279
Speaker 1: about that, first of all, the genius of doing this

749
00:36:24,360 --> 00:36:26,799
Speaker 1: over twenty years when you have no idea what the

750
00:36:26,840 --> 00:36:29,560
Speaker 1: outcome is, and hey, maybe we're wasting our lives in

751
00:36:29,600 --> 00:36:32,360
Speaker 1: our career doing this number one, but number two, you

752
00:36:32,400 --> 00:36:35,520
Speaker 1: come out and you see that it's cloudy, is it?

753
00:36:35,680 --> 00:36:39,480
Speaker 1: I'm assuming it's cloudy coast. They're reproducing in greater numbers,

754
00:36:39,719 --> 00:36:43,360
Speaker 1: they're processing the citrate, a whole bunch of different stuff

755
00:36:43,400 --> 00:36:47,600
Speaker 1: is going on than the other eleven environments. And one

756
00:36:47,800 --> 00:36:51,200
Speaker 1: has to imagine that if this wasn't taking place in

757
00:36:51,200 --> 00:36:57,520
Speaker 1: an experiment, but this was a big natural scenario, the

758
00:36:57,560 --> 00:37:02,000
Speaker 1: citrate consuming E. Coli would eventually take over the population

759
00:37:02,080 --> 00:37:05,560
Speaker 1: because they have twice as much food available, were more

760
00:37:06,080 --> 00:37:08,799
Speaker 1: than just the plain old glucose eating equal life.

761
00:37:08,920 --> 00:37:10,359
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is I mean when I was talking

762
00:37:10,440 --> 00:37:12,040
Speaker 2: to so one of the one of the researchers named

763
00:37:12,080 --> 00:37:14,640
Speaker 2: Richard Lensky, the other one Zach Blount, and I was

764
00:37:14,640 --> 00:37:16,640
Speaker 2: talking to them about this and they said, look, we

765
00:37:16,640 --> 00:37:18,919
Speaker 2: tried to control everything. We tried to control every single

766
00:37:18,920 --> 00:37:21,840
Speaker 2: you know, you pipett the exact same amount of solution

767
00:37:21,960 --> 00:37:23,960
Speaker 2: into the you know, into the beakers each day and

768
00:37:24,000 --> 00:37:26,239
Speaker 2: so on. But what they said was that, you know,

769
00:37:26,440 --> 00:37:29,200
Speaker 2: well what if one day, you know, when we were

770
00:37:29,360 --> 00:37:33,240
Speaker 2: washing the flask, just a tiny microscopic amount of soap

771
00:37:33,760 --> 00:37:36,920
Speaker 2: stayed on there, right, that could affect the evolution. And

772
00:37:36,960 --> 00:37:38,920
Speaker 2: so there's no I mean, even even in this experiment,

773
00:37:38,960 --> 00:37:41,080
Speaker 2: there's contingency they couldn't control, which is I mean, it's

774
00:37:41,120 --> 00:37:43,799
Speaker 2: the most controlled evolutionary experiment that's ever been done, but

775
00:37:43,840 --> 00:37:45,600
Speaker 2: it's still like, you know, these little tiny bits. If

776
00:37:45,600 --> 00:37:48,080
Speaker 2: you just have you know, a microscopic bit of soap,

777
00:37:48,400 --> 00:37:50,319
Speaker 2: well that's going to kill some of the bacteria, and

778
00:37:50,360 --> 00:37:53,000
Speaker 2: then the evolutionary pathway is going to be slightly changed.

779
00:37:53,239 --> 00:37:54,880
Speaker 2: And I think this is the stuff where, you know,

780
00:37:55,360 --> 00:37:58,040
Speaker 2: had they been a different researcher, had a grant run out,

781
00:37:58,320 --> 00:38:00,160
Speaker 2: they might have just said, okay, we've solved it. It's

782
00:38:00,160 --> 00:38:02,600
Speaker 2: all convergence. Because they could have shut down the experiment

783
00:38:02,640 --> 00:38:04,880
Speaker 2: after fifteen years. So there's just all these things that

784
00:38:04,880 --> 00:38:06,760
Speaker 2: are like layered on top of each other. And I think,

785
00:38:07,120 --> 00:38:08,960
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of scientists, especially in the world

786
00:38:08,960 --> 00:38:12,680
Speaker 2: of evolutionary biology, understands that this is something that we

787
00:38:13,320 --> 00:38:16,759
Speaker 2: really have to take seriously. And I think the way

788
00:38:16,800 --> 00:38:19,799
Speaker 2: that we are set up in human society is to

789
00:38:19,880 --> 00:38:22,719
Speaker 2: ignore the contingency because those are not useful things to

790
00:38:22,760 --> 00:38:26,360
Speaker 2: think about. They're the noise, They're the aberrations of the outliers,

791
00:38:26,360 --> 00:38:28,400
Speaker 2: you know, you delete them from the data whatever. And

792
00:38:28,440 --> 00:38:30,440
Speaker 2: I think this is the kind of stuff where the

793
00:38:30,560 --> 00:38:32,759
Speaker 2: lesson here is that those are actually central to the

794
00:38:32,840 --> 00:38:34,200
Speaker 2: question of how change happens.

795
00:38:34,760 --> 00:38:37,200
Speaker 1: I love this quote from the book. I began to

796
00:38:37,280 --> 00:38:40,080
Speaker 1: wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless

797
00:38:40,120 --> 00:38:45,240
Speaker 1: but feudal struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto

798
00:38:45,320 --> 00:38:49,920
Speaker 1: a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.

799
00:38:51,080 --> 00:38:52,880
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I think this is where I became

800
00:38:53,080 --> 00:38:55,440
Speaker 2: a bit of a disillusioned social scientist, to be honest,

801
00:38:55,560 --> 00:38:57,880
Speaker 2: was that I think that the way that I was

802
00:38:57,960 --> 00:39:01,600
Speaker 2: taught to present change to people was to come up

803
00:39:01,600 --> 00:39:04,120
Speaker 2: with a really elegant model, you know, a really beautiful

804
00:39:04,160 --> 00:39:08,000
Speaker 2: equation and that has statistical significance and has like the

805
00:39:08,000 --> 00:39:10,759
Speaker 2: smallest number of variables possible to explain the entire world.

806
00:39:11,440 --> 00:39:13,879
Speaker 2: And the reason that I ended up, you know, having

807
00:39:13,960 --> 00:39:16,640
Speaker 2: that mentality that I think we're trying to cram complexity

808
00:39:16,680 --> 00:39:18,720
Speaker 2: into these neat and tidy, sort of straight jack models

809
00:39:18,760 --> 00:39:22,359
Speaker 2: is because my PhD dissertation so on, I was looking

810
00:39:22,400 --> 00:39:25,799
Speaker 2: at the origin story of coups and civil wars. That

811
00:39:25,880 --> 00:39:29,440
Speaker 2: was part of my research. And these are black Swan events.

812
00:39:29,480 --> 00:39:31,640
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, there's only a few coup attempts

813
00:39:31,640 --> 00:39:34,880
Speaker 2: that happen every year, and they're so hard to predict.

814
00:39:35,000 --> 00:39:37,320
Speaker 2: I mean because you know, one of the coup plots

815
00:39:37,360 --> 00:39:40,719
Speaker 2: that I studied was where this guy, you know, who's

816
00:39:40,719 --> 00:39:42,799
Speaker 2: a sort of mid level officer in the army, just

817
00:39:42,840 --> 00:39:44,880
Speaker 2: on a whim, decides to try to overthrow the government.

818
00:39:45,560 --> 00:39:47,840
Speaker 2: And he's got like fifty guys in his command. This

819
00:39:47,920 --> 00:39:51,239
Speaker 2: is in nineteen ninety seven in Zambia, and you know,

820
00:39:51,320 --> 00:39:54,040
Speaker 2: his plan is to kidnap the army commander and force

821
00:39:54,080 --> 00:39:56,000
Speaker 2: the army commander to announce the coup on the radio.

822
00:39:56,040 --> 00:39:57,839
Speaker 2: It's not a stupid plan, it's actually it probably would

823
00:39:57,840 --> 00:40:00,520
Speaker 2: have worked, but the group of so soldiers that were

824
00:40:00,560 --> 00:40:03,279
Speaker 2: dispatched to the house. I interviewed some of them when

825
00:40:03,320 --> 00:40:05,680
Speaker 2: I went to Zambia, and they said, look, you know

826
00:40:05,719 --> 00:40:07,640
Speaker 2: we ran in the army commanders in his pajamas. He

827
00:40:07,680 --> 00:40:09,520
Speaker 2: runs out the back because he sees these soldiers coming

828
00:40:09,520 --> 00:40:12,759
Speaker 2: to kidnap him, and he climbs up the compound wall

829
00:40:13,200 --> 00:40:14,719
Speaker 2: and you know, it's like in a film where like

830
00:40:14,760 --> 00:40:17,600
Speaker 2: they grab his pant leg he's pulling up, they're pulling down,

831
00:40:17,960 --> 00:40:20,560
Speaker 2: and they just he slips through their fingers and he

832
00:40:20,600 --> 00:40:23,680
Speaker 2: then goes to the government HQ and announces that there's

833
00:40:23,680 --> 00:40:25,719
Speaker 2: a coup under a coup plot underway, and so the

834
00:40:25,760 --> 00:40:28,200
Speaker 2: soldiers go to the radio station. They capture the coup

835
00:40:28,280 --> 00:40:31,239
Speaker 2: ring leader, who's at this point literally hiding in a

836
00:40:31,280 --> 00:40:34,279
Speaker 2: trash can. Okay, three hours after the coup plot has

837
00:40:34,719 --> 00:40:36,799
Speaker 2: been hashed. Now, the problem is, I was reading all

838
00:40:36,800 --> 00:40:39,239
Speaker 2: this stuff about like Zambia's democracy, and it was oh,

839
00:40:39,320 --> 00:40:42,200
Speaker 2: Zambia is a resilient democracy. It's one of the beacons

840
00:40:42,200 --> 00:40:44,879
Speaker 2: of African democracy in the nineteen nineties. And I'm trying

841
00:40:44,920 --> 00:40:48,080
Speaker 2: to reconcile this with the fact that in my own research,

842
00:40:48,120 --> 00:40:50,160
Speaker 2: I'm finding this story where the soldier says like, yeah,

843
00:40:50,160 --> 00:40:52,360
Speaker 2: I think if I was like one second faster, I

844
00:40:52,440 --> 00:40:55,640
Speaker 2: probably would have gotten the government overthrown. And on top

845
00:40:55,680 --> 00:40:58,879
Speaker 2: of this, the other contingency was they didn't chase him.

846
00:40:58,880 --> 00:41:00,560
Speaker 2: And I said, why didn't you chase them? We said, well,

847
00:41:01,320 --> 00:41:04,600
Speaker 2: the army commander's wife was really attractive and we wanted

848
00:41:04,600 --> 00:41:06,880
Speaker 2: to talk to her. And also we opened the fridge

849
00:41:07,400 --> 00:41:10,400
Speaker 2: and there's Namibian import beer in the fridge and we

850
00:41:10,480 --> 00:41:12,759
Speaker 2: hadn't had Namibian beer for a long time, so we said,

851
00:41:12,880 --> 00:41:14,920
Speaker 2: you know, screw this, We're gonna We're gonna drink some

852
00:41:14,960 --> 00:41:17,160
Speaker 2: beer and talk to the wife. And I'm thinking, you know,

853
00:41:17,280 --> 00:41:19,200
Speaker 2: like like how do I put this in my model?

854
00:41:19,360 --> 00:41:20,960
Speaker 2: Like you know, I mean, like like what is my

855
00:41:21,040 --> 00:41:23,640
Speaker 2: quantitative analysis going to show me about this? And I

856
00:41:23,640 --> 00:41:27,000
Speaker 2: think that's the stuff where those little pivot points and

857
00:41:27,080 --> 00:41:29,880
Speaker 2: studying really rare events that are highly consequential makes you

858
00:41:29,920 --> 00:41:32,319
Speaker 2: think differently about the nature of social change. And I

859
00:41:32,320 --> 00:41:34,960
Speaker 2: would go to these like political science conferences and I

860
00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:36,920
Speaker 2: was just like, I don't I don't believe this is

861
00:41:36,920 --> 00:41:38,799
Speaker 2: how the world works. I think there are times where

862
00:41:38,800 --> 00:41:41,239
Speaker 2: these can be useful models, but I don't think we're

863
00:41:41,239 --> 00:41:43,640
Speaker 2: capturing reality accurately, and that's where, you know, some of

864
00:41:43,680 --> 00:41:47,040
Speaker 2: the origin story professionally of the book comes from you.

865
00:41:47,000 --> 00:41:50,480
Speaker 1: Have to build in attractive women and imported beer exactly

866
00:41:50,520 --> 00:41:55,360
Speaker 1: into your models, or or more accurately, just completely random

867
00:41:55,400 --> 00:41:59,560
Speaker 1: events there. There's a research note in the book from

868
00:41:59,560 --> 00:42:03,920
Speaker 1: an evolutionary biologists seventy eight percent of new species were

869
00:42:03,960 --> 00:42:09,640
Speaker 1: triggered by a single event, typically a random mistake or

870
00:42:09,680 --> 00:42:10,520
Speaker 1: genetic error.

871
00:42:11,040 --> 00:42:14,240
Speaker 2: Yeah. My favorite example this is something called the bottleneck effect,

872
00:42:14,280 --> 00:42:16,160
Speaker 2: and it's actually I think it's actually an important idea

873
00:42:16,320 --> 00:42:19,880
Speaker 2: for economics as well. So I'll start with the biology.

874
00:42:19,920 --> 00:42:23,279
Speaker 2: The bottleneck is where a population arbitrarily gets reduced to

875
00:42:23,320 --> 00:42:26,160
Speaker 2: a very small number. And the number of people in

876
00:42:26,200 --> 00:42:27,839
Speaker 2: that population could be you know, it could be ten,

877
00:42:27,880 --> 00:42:30,040
Speaker 2: it could be one hundred, whatever it is. But who

878
00:42:30,080 --> 00:42:33,160
Speaker 2: those ten or one hundred people are really really matters.

879
00:42:33,200 --> 00:42:35,960
Speaker 2: So there's one island, for example, where half the population

880
00:42:36,040 --> 00:42:39,880
Speaker 2: as asthma because it was populated initially by this bottleneck

881
00:42:39,880 --> 00:42:42,319
Speaker 2: of a very small number of people who disproportionately had

882
00:42:42,360 --> 00:42:45,520
Speaker 2: more asthma than the rest of the population. There's elephant seals,

883
00:42:45,520 --> 00:42:48,440
Speaker 2: for example, who got whittled down through hunting and so

884
00:42:48,480 --> 00:42:51,440
Speaker 2: on to something like I think it's fifty breeding pairs

885
00:42:51,480 --> 00:42:54,880
Speaker 2: or something like that, but which exact seals lived or

886
00:42:54,920 --> 00:42:58,319
Speaker 2: died completely changed the trajectory of that species. Now, I

887
00:42:58,360 --> 00:43:01,719
Speaker 2: sort of say this because human society has had bottlenecks

888
00:43:01,680 --> 00:43:04,160
Speaker 2: at various times. We don't know exactly how small they've been,

889
00:43:04,160 --> 00:43:07,480
Speaker 2: but the hypothesis is perhaps that it may have been

890
00:43:07,520 --> 00:43:10,239
Speaker 2: as few as a few thousand humans at one point,

891
00:43:10,480 --> 00:43:14,000
Speaker 2: and which humans were in that group that determined everything

892
00:43:14,040 --> 00:43:16,799
Speaker 2: for who's allowed now, right, So if you swap out,

893
00:43:16,840 --> 00:43:19,439
Speaker 2: you know, one person for a different person, you've changed

894
00:43:19,440 --> 00:43:20,719
Speaker 2: the trajectory of the species.

895
00:43:20,920 --> 00:43:21,040
Speaker 1: Now.

896
00:43:21,040 --> 00:43:23,680
Speaker 2: I think this is also true when you think about economics,

897
00:43:23,680 --> 00:43:26,640
Speaker 2: you think about innovation. Every so often shocks go through

898
00:43:26,640 --> 00:43:30,520
Speaker 2: industries and they whittle down the competition, and who survives

899
00:43:30,560 --> 00:43:33,120
Speaker 2: in that moment is potentially somewhat arbitrary. It could be

900
00:43:33,120 --> 00:43:35,520
Speaker 2: based on some pressures, it could be a smart CEO,

901
00:43:35,640 --> 00:43:39,160
Speaker 2: whatever it is, But the sort of survivors in that bottleneck,

902
00:43:39,440 --> 00:43:41,840
Speaker 2: then we'll dictate how the industry might unfold in the future.

903
00:43:41,840 --> 00:43:44,160
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, Apple has this outsized effect on

904
00:43:44,200 --> 00:43:46,960
Speaker 2: the tech industry, but you know, maybe the time means

905
00:43:46,960 --> 00:43:48,440
Speaker 2: a little bit different in Apple dice.

906
00:43:48,760 --> 00:43:51,399
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not implausible, but for Microsoft giving them

907
00:43:51,400 --> 00:43:54,440
Speaker 1: alone and what was it ninety eight eighty, but for

908
00:43:55,040 --> 00:43:58,520
Speaker 1: any trust case which gave Microsoft an incentive to have

909
00:43:58,600 --> 00:44:01,040
Speaker 1: another survival ble operating system.

910
00:44:01,080 --> 00:44:02,799
Speaker 2: Who knows. Yeah, And so this you know, when you

911
00:44:02,800 --> 00:44:05,480
Speaker 2: think about I think bottlenecks are a useful way of

912
00:44:05,480 --> 00:44:08,880
Speaker 2: thinking about this, partly because they affect trajectories very very profoundly,

913
00:44:09,360 --> 00:44:11,520
Speaker 2: but also because they can be arbitrary. And I think

914
00:44:11,560 --> 00:44:14,800
Speaker 2: this is something where what we do in human society

915
00:44:14,880 --> 00:44:17,359
Speaker 2: is we write history backwards, so we look at who

916
00:44:17,440 --> 00:44:19,840
Speaker 2: is successful and we say, I mean hindsight bias. You

917
00:44:19,840 --> 00:44:21,360
Speaker 2: know many people, I'm sure I've talked to you about this,

918
00:44:21,400 --> 00:44:24,759
Speaker 2: but it's very important to underline that, like when these

919
00:44:24,840 --> 00:44:28,719
Speaker 2: arbitrary things happen, if you then infer causality, that's a

920
00:44:28,760 --> 00:44:32,360
Speaker 2: neat and tidy story, you actually are learning exactly the

921
00:44:32,400 --> 00:44:35,680
Speaker 2: wrong lesson. I mean, the reason these particular elephant seals

922
00:44:35,680 --> 00:44:38,400
Speaker 2: survived is probably arbitrary. It just happened to depend on

923
00:44:38,440 --> 00:44:42,160
Speaker 2: who the people who are proaching them, you know, happen

924
00:44:42,239 --> 00:44:45,040
Speaker 2: to stumble upon. And then of course the evolutionary history

925
00:44:45,040 --> 00:44:48,000
Speaker 2: of that animal is completely changed. So I think that

926
00:44:48,560 --> 00:44:50,799
Speaker 2: lesson is that, you know, sometimes when bottlenecks happen, it

927
00:44:50,840 --> 00:44:53,319
Speaker 2: reshapes the trajectory of the future, but it also is

928
00:44:54,400 --> 00:44:58,120
Speaker 2: inescapably arbitrary at times, and we don't like that. I mean,

929
00:44:58,160 --> 00:45:00,480
Speaker 2: the entire world of self help and the entire world

930
00:45:00,560 --> 00:45:05,080
Speaker 2: of sort of business advice is, oh, these people were successful,

931
00:45:05,120 --> 00:45:07,640
Speaker 2: here's how you replicate it. And the replication is always

932
00:45:07,920 --> 00:45:09,600
Speaker 2: just do what they did, right. But I mean, of

933
00:45:09,600 --> 00:45:11,239
Speaker 2: course the world's different now. I mean, if you do

934
00:45:11,360 --> 00:45:14,239
Speaker 2: what they did, you're just making something that's not truly innovative. Right.

935
00:45:14,280 --> 00:45:19,040
Speaker 1: You can't invent an iPhone today exactly. So it's fascinating

936
00:45:19,040 --> 00:45:21,759
Speaker 1: when you talk about bottlenecks. I read a book some

937
00:45:21,880 --> 00:45:25,440
Speaker 1: years ago called Last Ape stand In, and it talks

938
00:45:25,480 --> 00:45:31,719
Speaker 1: about all the various proto human species, from Chromagnum to

939
00:45:31,760 --> 00:45:36,799
Speaker 1: Neanderthal to Homo sapiens. And the theory is that in

940
00:45:36,840 --> 00:45:40,680
Speaker 1: the last ice Age, maybe it's twenty or forty thousand

941
00:45:40,800 --> 00:45:44,640
Speaker 1: years ago, we were down to a few thousand humans.

942
00:45:46,160 --> 00:45:50,680
Speaker 1: But for the Ice Age ending when it did another

943
00:45:50,760 --> 00:45:54,279
Speaker 1: year again, we may not be having this conversation. There

944
00:45:54,280 --> 00:45:55,440
Speaker 1: may be no humans around.

945
00:45:55,719 --> 00:45:57,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this is the This is the stuff

946
00:45:57,800 --> 00:46:00,600
Speaker 2: also where I think that the sort of predictable patterns

947
00:46:00,600 --> 00:46:03,560
Speaker 2: that people try to impose on the world are also

948
00:46:03,840 --> 00:46:07,880
Speaker 2: subject to whims of timing. Right, And your example is

949
00:46:08,280 --> 00:46:10,600
Speaker 2: completely apt, and I think it's a very important one.

950
00:46:10,640 --> 00:46:12,399
Speaker 2: And I think it also speaks to the question when

951
00:46:12,440 --> 00:46:14,240
Speaker 2: you say when the ice age ends, right, the timing

952
00:46:14,280 --> 00:46:17,640
Speaker 2: issue is so important. Now, one of my you know,

953
00:46:17,719 --> 00:46:19,960
Speaker 2: examples of this that I think is so fascinating is

954
00:46:20,440 --> 00:46:23,400
Speaker 2: you think about, like our daily lives, and our daily

955
00:46:23,440 --> 00:46:27,160
Speaker 2: lives are you know, basically set up in groups of seven. Okay,

956
00:46:27,239 --> 00:46:29,239
Speaker 2: we've got a seven day week. Why is that? So

957
00:46:29,280 --> 00:46:32,360
Speaker 2: I start looking into this and effectively what happens is

958
00:46:32,400 --> 00:46:35,920
Speaker 2: there's this period in ancient Rome where they have this

959
00:46:36,000 --> 00:46:38,960
Speaker 2: superstition that says the planets are really important for being

960
00:46:39,000 --> 00:46:41,760
Speaker 2: you know, auspicious and so on, and they can see

961
00:46:41,800 --> 00:46:44,640
Speaker 2: because they don't have telescopes, five planets with the naked

962
00:46:44,680 --> 00:46:47,160
Speaker 2: eye and the Sun and the moon. You add them up,

963
00:46:47,239 --> 00:46:49,799
Speaker 2: that's seven. They set up a seven day week because

964
00:46:49,800 --> 00:46:51,800
Speaker 2: of that. That's why we divide our lives in seven.

965
00:46:52,080 --> 00:46:53,960
Speaker 2: And it's because of this lock, this this this thing

966
00:46:53,960 --> 00:46:55,440
Speaker 2: that I also talk about in Fluke, which is this

967
00:46:55,480 --> 00:46:58,120
Speaker 2: concept of lock in where an arbitrary thing can happen

968
00:46:58,440 --> 00:47:00,960
Speaker 2: and then sometimes it persists and sometimes it doesn't, and

969
00:47:00,960 --> 00:47:03,719
Speaker 2: that's often very random. So my other example of this

970
00:47:03,880 --> 00:47:06,680
Speaker 2: is everything that we write, everything that we say, is

971
00:47:06,680 --> 00:47:09,240
Speaker 2: derived from English being locked in when the printing press

972
00:47:09,320 --> 00:47:11,960
Speaker 2: was invented. If the printing press had been invented, you know,

973
00:47:12,040 --> 00:47:14,200
Speaker 2: six decades earlier, six decades later, there'd be a different

974
00:47:14,239 --> 00:47:16,560
Speaker 2: language because the language was in flux, and all of

975
00:47:16,560 --> 00:47:19,400
Speaker 2: a sudden it became really important to have a standardized system.

976
00:47:19,600 --> 00:47:20,839
Speaker 2: So a lot of people used to write the word

977
00:47:20,920 --> 00:47:25,719
Speaker 2: had hadd Now that was expensive because they figured, okay,

978
00:47:25,719 --> 00:47:27,600
Speaker 2: we've got a typeset this with a bunch of letters.

979
00:47:27,680 --> 00:47:29,880
Speaker 2: Why don't we just do had and I'll boom, all

980
00:47:29,920 --> 00:47:32,120
Speaker 2: of a sudden the language changes. Right, So there's a

981
00:47:32,200 --> 00:47:34,319
Speaker 2: series of things that happen really really quickly, but they

982
00:47:34,320 --> 00:47:36,879
Speaker 2: basically produce modern English. And so I think this sort

983
00:47:36,920 --> 00:47:40,319
Speaker 2: of concept of the arbitrary experimentation and you know, superstition

984
00:47:40,360 --> 00:47:42,560
Speaker 2: of the Romans and then getting locked in and the

985
00:47:42,560 --> 00:47:44,520
Speaker 2: empire sort of sets it up and then it spreads

986
00:47:44,520 --> 00:47:46,279
Speaker 2: and all that, and then you think, okay, why do

987
00:47:46,280 --> 00:47:47,640
Speaker 2: we have a five day working way. I mean, it's

988
00:47:47,640 --> 00:47:51,759
Speaker 2: partly tied to, you know, this superstition about the auspicious

989
00:47:51,840 --> 00:47:55,240
Speaker 2: nature of the visible planets, which themselves are an arbitrary

990
00:47:55,239 --> 00:47:57,719
Speaker 2: byproduct of how our eyes evolved. So I mean, it's

991
00:47:57,760 --> 00:47:59,680
Speaker 2: just sort of an everything you think about has got

992
00:47:59,680 --> 00:48:02,200
Speaker 2: these sort of tentacles where they could have been slightly

993
00:48:02,239 --> 00:48:04,760
Speaker 2: different and then our lives would be radically changed.

994
00:48:05,120 --> 00:48:07,759
Speaker 1: One of the things that's so fascinating with us as

995
00:48:08,120 --> 00:48:11,920
Speaker 1: narrative storytellers, Right, we think about, Okay, we've had the

996
00:48:11,960 --> 00:48:16,080
Speaker 1: spoken language for tens of thousands of years, maybe one

997
00:48:16,160 --> 00:48:19,440
Speaker 1: hundred thousand years, and we think about the cuneiform and

998
00:48:19,480 --> 00:48:23,120
Speaker 1: the written language going back to the Egyptians and the Greeks.

999
00:48:23,719 --> 00:48:28,760
Speaker 1: But that's history, and ninety nine percent of the people

1000
00:48:28,800 --> 00:48:34,520
Speaker 1: who lived during that period were illiterate. In fact, species

1001
00:48:34,560 --> 00:48:38,279
Speaker 1: wide literacy, which we arguably still don't have but are

1002
00:48:38,320 --> 00:48:41,920
Speaker 1: closer to. This is like a century old, like for

1003
00:48:41,960 --> 00:48:46,120
Speaker 1: a hundred years people could read and write and meaning

1004
00:48:46,200 --> 00:48:50,160
Speaker 1: most people, but go back beyond the century, and the

1005
00:48:50,320 --> 00:48:54,120
Speaker 1: vast majority of people either couldn't read, couldn't write, never

1006
00:48:54,160 --> 00:48:57,000
Speaker 1: went to school. They had to get up and work

1007
00:48:57,040 --> 00:48:59,520
Speaker 1: in the land. They didn't have time to mess around

1008
00:48:59,520 --> 00:49:00,680
Speaker 1: with this stuff.

1009
00:49:01,440 --> 00:49:03,560
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I think there's a lot of things

1010
00:49:03,600 --> 00:49:06,680
Speaker 2: where we are blinded to the fact that we have

1011
00:49:07,000 --> 00:49:09,600
Speaker 2: lives that are unlike any humans who have come before us, right,

1012
00:49:10,040 --> 00:49:12,640
Speaker 2: And I think there's some really big superstructure events that

1013
00:49:12,719 --> 00:49:15,200
Speaker 2: are related to this that that really do affect our lives.

1014
00:49:15,239 --> 00:49:18,440
Speaker 2: So my favorite way of thinking about this is that

1015
00:49:18,520 --> 00:49:21,400
Speaker 2: I think that every human who came before the modern period,

1016
00:49:21,440 --> 00:49:23,239
Speaker 2: most you know, at least you know, maybe the last

1017
00:49:23,239 --> 00:49:26,320
Speaker 2: two hundred years or so, what they experienced was uncertainty

1018
00:49:26,360 --> 00:49:28,560
Speaker 2: in their day to day life. There was almost no regularity,

1019
00:49:28,600 --> 00:49:30,160
Speaker 2: no patterns in their day to day life. They didn't

1020
00:49:30,160 --> 00:49:31,880
Speaker 2: know where their next meal would come from. They didn't know,

1021
00:49:32,200 --> 00:49:33,920
Speaker 2: you know, whether they would get eaten by an animal,

1022
00:49:34,239 --> 00:49:36,440
Speaker 2: et cetera, the crops might fail, you know, et cetera.

1023
00:49:37,200 --> 00:49:39,719
Speaker 2: But they had what I call global stability, which is

1024
00:49:39,760 --> 00:49:41,719
Speaker 2: to say, like the parents and the children lived in

1025
00:49:41,719 --> 00:49:43,319
Speaker 2: the same kind of world. You're a hunter gather, your

1026
00:49:43,400 --> 00:49:45,719
Speaker 2: kids a hunter gather, you know, And this means that

1027
00:49:45,719 --> 00:49:48,520
Speaker 2: the parents teach the kids how to use technology. There's

1028
00:49:48,560 --> 00:49:51,319
Speaker 2: basically regularity from generation to generation.

1029
00:49:51,080 --> 00:49:52,040
Speaker 1: For thousands of years.

1030
00:49:52,120 --> 00:49:54,279
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have flipped that right. So what we have

1031
00:49:54,440 --> 00:49:57,960
Speaker 2: is local stability and global instability. So we have extreme

1032
00:49:58,040 --> 00:50:01,000
Speaker 2: regularity like no human has ever experienced before, where we

1033
00:50:01,040 --> 00:50:03,640
Speaker 2: can know to almost the minute when something we order

1034
00:50:03,680 --> 00:50:05,359
Speaker 2: off the internet is going to arrive at our house,

1035
00:50:05,920 --> 00:50:07,800
Speaker 2: and we go to Starbucks anywhere in the world and

1036
00:50:07,840 --> 00:50:09,120
Speaker 2: we can have the same drink and it's going to

1037
00:50:09,120 --> 00:50:11,239
Speaker 2: taste basically the same thing, and we're really angry if

1038
00:50:11,280 --> 00:50:13,879
Speaker 2: somebody messes up, you know, in order, because that that

1039
00:50:14,040 --> 00:50:17,840
Speaker 2: expectation of regularity is so high. But we have global instability.

1040
00:50:17,880 --> 00:50:19,200
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I grew up in a world

1041
00:50:19,200 --> 00:50:22,239
Speaker 2: where the Internet didn't exist really for ordinary people, and

1042
00:50:22,280 --> 00:50:24,840
Speaker 2: now it's impossible to live without it. You know. You

1043
00:50:24,840 --> 00:50:26,960
Speaker 2: think about the ways that children teach parents how to

1044
00:50:27,040 --> 00:50:29,920
Speaker 2: use technology that's never been possible before. And on top

1045
00:50:29,960 --> 00:50:31,680
Speaker 2: of this, you have the sort of AI you know,

1046
00:50:32,640 --> 00:50:35,360
Speaker 2: rise where the world's going to profoundly change in a

1047
00:50:35,400 --> 00:50:39,319
Speaker 2: very short period of time. There has never been a

1048
00:50:39,360 --> 00:50:43,640
Speaker 2: generation of our species. We're not just the global dynamics

1049
00:50:43,640 --> 00:50:47,480
Speaker 2: have changed generation to generation, but within generations. I mean,

1050
00:50:47,480 --> 00:50:49,600
Speaker 2: we're going to live in a world where, you know,

1051
00:50:49,680 --> 00:50:53,080
Speaker 2: the way that we understand and navigate systems and our

1052
00:50:53,120 --> 00:50:56,160
Speaker 2: lives is going to change multiple times in one lifetime.

1053
00:50:56,520 --> 00:50:59,120
Speaker 2: And you think about you know, Hunter gathers that the

1054
00:50:59,320 --> 00:51:02,799
Speaker 2: average human generations about twenty six point nine years. In

1055
00:51:02,840 --> 00:51:05,279
Speaker 2: the long stretch of our species, you can go twenty

1056
00:51:05,280 --> 00:51:07,960
Speaker 2: seven years over and over and over. It's pretty much

1057
00:51:07,960 --> 00:51:10,680
Speaker 2: the same world for pretty much the entirety of our

1058
00:51:10,719 --> 00:51:12,719
Speaker 2: species until I would say the last you know, maybe

1059
00:51:12,719 --> 00:51:14,759
Speaker 2: one hundred years or so. And that's the thing, you know,

1060
00:51:15,400 --> 00:51:17,080
Speaker 2: you think about this. The more you think about this,

1061
00:51:17,160 --> 00:51:18,839
Speaker 2: the more of these examples you find. I mean, one

1062
00:51:18,880 --> 00:51:20,560
Speaker 2: of them is, you know, jet leg I flew in

1063
00:51:20,600 --> 00:51:23,560
Speaker 2: from London and there's been three generations of people who

1064
00:51:23,600 --> 00:51:26,600
Speaker 2: could ever move fast enough to knock out their biology

1065
00:51:26,600 --> 00:51:28,680
Speaker 2: in a way that they have jet legs. So, I mean,

1066
00:51:28,680 --> 00:51:31,640
Speaker 2: there's just a million things that we experience as routine

1067
00:51:32,080 --> 00:51:33,879
Speaker 2: that no humans before us have ever brought.

1068
00:51:34,040 --> 00:51:38,000
Speaker 1: You can never outrun your circadian rhythms until you could

1069
00:51:38,239 --> 00:51:41,080
Speaker 1: travel at a few hundred miles an hour and go

1070
00:51:41,120 --> 00:51:44,920
Speaker 1: from from country to country change You couldn't even change

1071
00:51:44,960 --> 00:51:48,239
Speaker 1: time zones until what is it, seventy five years ago.

1072
00:51:48,560 --> 00:51:51,200
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, there's an amazing map. I don't know

1073
00:51:51,239 --> 00:51:53,799
Speaker 2: the exact name of it. I think it's an isochrome

1074
00:51:53,800 --> 00:51:55,920
Speaker 2: map or something like that, but it's a map of

1075
00:51:55,960 --> 00:51:59,680
Speaker 2: London from one hundred plus years ago, and it's showing

1076
00:51:59,719 --> 00:52:02,200
Speaker 2: the war based on how long it takes you to

1077
00:52:02,239 --> 00:52:06,080
Speaker 2: get anywhere. And you see that like western Europe is

1078
00:52:06,280 --> 00:52:08,640
Speaker 2: you know, the closest, and it's like five plus days

1079
00:52:08,719 --> 00:52:11,920
Speaker 2: or whatever. Right now, somebody made a renewed version of

1080
00:52:11,920 --> 00:52:14,360
Speaker 2: that map a couple of years ago, and the furthest

1081
00:52:14,400 --> 00:52:16,400
Speaker 2: reach you can go is like thirty six plus hours,

1082
00:52:16,400 --> 00:52:19,160
Speaker 2: where in the old map it was like three plus months.

1083
00:52:19,760 --> 00:52:21,520
Speaker 2: And you know that's the stuff as well, where we

1084
00:52:21,920 --> 00:52:23,880
Speaker 2: just we've sped up the world so much. And I

1085
00:52:23,920 --> 00:52:26,480
Speaker 2: think this is embedded a lot of the dynamics where

1086
00:52:26,520 --> 00:52:29,600
Speaker 2: flukes and sort of chance events become more common.

1087
00:52:29,520 --> 00:52:31,839
Speaker 1: Thirty six hours. I think you get to the moon

1088
00:52:31,880 --> 00:52:34,520
Speaker 1: in thirty six hours, right, It's true, And that's how

1089
00:52:34,600 --> 00:52:37,279
Speaker 1: much it's changed. Yeah, So let's let's play a little

1090
00:52:37,280 --> 00:52:41,920
Speaker 1: bit of a game called convergence or contingency. We talked

1091
00:52:41,960 --> 00:52:48,640
Speaker 1: before about sometimes hey, multiple evolutionary paths lead to flight

1092
00:52:49,120 --> 00:52:52,520
Speaker 1: in very different ways, and sometimes it's just a random

1093
00:52:52,719 --> 00:52:56,560
Speaker 1: meteor wiping out the dinosaurs. So once convergence. The other

1094
00:52:56,760 --> 00:53:00,840
Speaker 1: is contingency. And since you're in from London, Brexit was

1095
00:53:00,880 --> 00:53:04,239
Speaker 1: that a function of random elements or was that a

1096
00:53:04,280 --> 00:53:06,440
Speaker 1: convergence that was a long time in the make.

1097
00:53:07,040 --> 00:53:09,000
Speaker 2: Well, like most things, is both. I mean, I think

1098
00:53:09,040 --> 00:53:11,040
Speaker 2: there are factors around the Brexit vote that could have

1099
00:53:11,160 --> 00:53:13,200
Speaker 2: very quick clearly gone the other way. I mean, there

1100
00:53:13,239 --> 00:53:15,720
Speaker 2: are the timing of the vote could have been different,

1101
00:53:16,520 --> 00:53:18,920
Speaker 2: the ways that the polls were presented could have been different.

1102
00:53:19,600 --> 00:53:22,279
Speaker 2: And also I think some of the dynamics of how

1103
00:53:22,280 --> 00:53:25,200
Speaker 2: the EU behave could have been slightly different. So I mean, yeah,

1104
00:53:25,560 --> 00:53:30,040
Speaker 2: anytime you have a close outcome, it produces you know,

1105
00:53:30,080 --> 00:53:32,160
Speaker 2: I think contingency where it could have it could have

1106
00:53:32,360 --> 00:53:34,920
Speaker 2: gone the other way. But there are trends as well, right,

1107
00:53:34,960 --> 00:53:37,960
Speaker 2: I mean, there's these are the things where I'm even

1108
00:53:38,000 --> 00:53:41,360
Speaker 2: though I believe that Flukes changed the world profoundly regularly,

1109
00:53:41,840 --> 00:53:44,960
Speaker 2: I also completely accept the idea that there are sort

1110
00:53:44,960 --> 00:53:47,960
Speaker 2: of long term forces that yield something like Brexit. And

1111
00:53:48,000 --> 00:53:51,360
Speaker 2: there was a long sort of bubbling antagonism to immigration

1112
00:53:51,520 --> 00:53:54,120
Speaker 2: levels and anger at Brussels and all these sorts of

1113
00:53:54,160 --> 00:53:57,640
Speaker 2: things which politicians capitalized on and leads to Brexit. I mean,

1114
00:53:57,680 --> 00:54:00,239
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that will be interesten

1115
00:54:00,280 --> 00:54:03,759
Speaker 2: about this, and perhaps the biggest convergence, is the conversation

1116
00:54:03,840 --> 00:54:07,000
Speaker 2: which David Cameron decided to hold the referendum. That would

1117
00:54:07,000 --> 00:54:10,040
Speaker 2: be the biggest con contingency for me because he thought,

1118
00:54:11,160 --> 00:54:13,359
Speaker 2: at least as has been reported, he thought that he

1119
00:54:13,400 --> 00:54:15,400
Speaker 2: was going to put to bed the challenge from the

1120
00:54:15,440 --> 00:54:18,279
Speaker 2: right in the Conservative Party by holding the referendum, that

1121
00:54:18,320 --> 00:54:19,800
Speaker 2: he would win and that he would have to stop

1122
00:54:19,800 --> 00:54:22,880
Speaker 2: dealing with questions about Brexit, and of course it backfired

1123
00:54:22,920 --> 00:54:25,160
Speaker 2: on him. He didn't really believe in Brexit, but he

1124
00:54:25,200 --> 00:54:28,120
Speaker 2: figured this was a political ploy that would know basically

1125
00:54:28,560 --> 00:54:31,680
Speaker 2: cut off the pivot to the right. So that's one

1126
00:54:31,719 --> 00:54:33,120
Speaker 2: of those things where you know, if a different set

1127
00:54:33,160 --> 00:54:34,799
Speaker 2: of people had been in the room with Cameron, then

1128
00:54:35,239 --> 00:54:37,160
Speaker 2: maybe they don't hold a referendum, and then that's a

1129
00:54:37,239 --> 00:54:38,279
Speaker 2: very different world we live in.

1130
00:54:38,360 --> 00:54:41,040
Speaker 1: Huh. So you're over in the UK looking at the

1131
00:54:41,200 --> 00:54:46,240
Speaker 1: United States as a political science, the election of Donald

1132
00:54:46,280 --> 00:54:50,959
Speaker 1: Trump in twenty sixteen by forty or fifty thousand votes

1133
00:54:51,000 --> 00:54:55,120
Speaker 1: in a handful of swing states. Fascinating question was that

1134
00:54:55,680 --> 00:54:59,960
Speaker 1: a random contingency or was the convergence and the art

1135
00:55:00,080 --> 00:55:04,360
Speaker 1: ark of history moving towards a populist in the United States.

1136
00:55:04,680 --> 00:55:07,839
Speaker 2: Yes, so there's sort of precursor factors that Trump tacked

1137
00:55:07,840 --> 00:55:09,440
Speaker 2: into and this is the convergence, right, this is the

1138
00:55:09,440 --> 00:55:11,840
Speaker 2: stuff that's the trends. I do think there's some pretty

1139
00:55:11,840 --> 00:55:14,520
Speaker 2: big contingencies around Trump. I mean, there's there's one hypothesis

1140
00:55:14,520 --> 00:55:16,479
Speaker 2: which I you know, I can't I don't know Donald

1141
00:55:16,480 --> 00:55:19,520
Speaker 2: Trump's thinking, but there's speculation by people who are close

1142
00:55:19,560 --> 00:55:22,040
Speaker 2: to him that the moment he decided he would definitely

1143
00:55:22,120 --> 00:55:24,640
Speaker 2: run for the twenty sixteen race was in twenty eleven

1144
00:55:24,719 --> 00:55:27,000
Speaker 2: when there was the White House Correspondence dinner and he

1145
00:55:27,160 --> 00:55:30,120
Speaker 2: was exactly and he was publicly humiliated by Barack Obama

1146
00:55:30,160 --> 00:55:33,080
Speaker 2: with a joke that basically said something to the effect of,

1147
00:55:33,520 --> 00:55:36,000
Speaker 2: I really sympathize with you, Donald because I couldn't handle

1148
00:55:36,040 --> 00:55:38,560
Speaker 2: the hard choices that you have to make on Celebrity Apprentice,

1149
00:55:38,840 --> 00:55:40,800
Speaker 2: whereas I, you know, have to make the easy choices

1150
00:55:40,800 --> 00:55:43,000
Speaker 2: in the situation room. And everyone's sort of laughing at

1151
00:55:43,000 --> 00:55:45,480
Speaker 2: Donald Trump and so on. And the question is, you know,

1152
00:55:45,520 --> 00:55:47,560
Speaker 2: if the joke writer had not come up with that

1153
00:55:47,600 --> 00:55:50,239
Speaker 2: idea or Obama said at let's just can that joke.

1154
00:55:50,640 --> 00:55:53,879
Speaker 2: Does Trump run? I mean, that's question one. Then there's

1155
00:55:53,880 --> 00:55:56,800
Speaker 2: the questions around the election, right, And this is something where,

1156
00:55:57,600 --> 00:56:00,480
Speaker 2: you know, without going into too much detail, the reopening

1157
00:56:00,520 --> 00:56:03,080
Speaker 2: of the FBI investigation, which happens because of a congressman

1158
00:56:03,120 --> 00:56:05,960
Speaker 2: in New York and his inability to sort of control himself.

1159
00:56:06,120 --> 00:56:11,120
Speaker 1: Right, you know that send naked genital pictures to underage women.

1160
00:56:11,239 --> 00:56:12,759
Speaker 2: Thank you for saying it for me. So there's a

1161
00:56:12,840 --> 00:56:15,080
Speaker 2: you know, this is the thing where this causes the

1162
00:56:15,080 --> 00:56:17,440
Speaker 2: reopening the FBI investigation. Did this cause a shift in

1163
00:56:17,520 --> 00:56:19,960
Speaker 2: votes in those three critical states? I don't know, but possibly,

1164
00:56:20,040 --> 00:56:22,640
Speaker 2: right could be. And on top of that, you have

1165
00:56:23,560 --> 00:56:25,000
Speaker 2: one of my things that I do talk about in

1166
00:56:25,000 --> 00:56:27,440
Speaker 2: the book. I have a chapter on called the Lottery

1167
00:56:27,440 --> 00:56:30,279
Speaker 2: of Earth. And this is the strangest example of US

1168
00:56:30,280 --> 00:56:33,360
Speaker 2: politics with a fluke. Around the time of the dinosaurs,

1169
00:56:33,360 --> 00:56:35,840
Speaker 2: there was an ancient inland sea in America and it

1170
00:56:35,920 --> 00:56:37,799
Speaker 2: basically had a coastline that would if you were going

1171
00:56:37,800 --> 00:56:39,319
Speaker 2: to chart it today, it would be like a little

1172
00:56:39,320 --> 00:56:43,000
Speaker 2: crescent shape, a sort of swoop across Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

1173
00:56:43,680 --> 00:56:46,240
Speaker 2: Now what happens is on the coastline there's these fital

1174
00:56:46,280 --> 00:56:50,239
Speaker 2: plankton that live in this shallow sea and when they die,

1175
00:56:50,360 --> 00:56:52,920
Speaker 2: their bodies eventually get turned into these really, really rich

1176
00:56:52,960 --> 00:56:55,120
Speaker 2: soils when the sea ends. Now, I promise this makes

1177
00:56:55,120 --> 00:56:59,160
Speaker 2: sense for how it links to Trump. This produces extremely

1178
00:56:59,200 --> 00:57:01,439
Speaker 2: fertile soil and what's called the Black Belt. And when

1179
00:57:01,680 --> 00:57:06,239
Speaker 2: slavery was developed, the plantations are. You can map them

1180
00:57:06,520 --> 00:57:09,160
Speaker 2: exactly where the ancient in lan Sea was. That's where

1181
00:57:09,160 --> 00:57:11,520
Speaker 2: they go. So this means that there's all these enslaved

1182
00:57:11,560 --> 00:57:13,759
Speaker 2: people brought to the southern United States according to this

1183
00:57:13,800 --> 00:57:17,160
Speaker 2: ancient coastline, and a lot of the people who were

1184
00:57:17,360 --> 00:57:20,600
Speaker 2: freed then settled there. And so the demographics of those

1185
00:57:21,040 --> 00:57:24,280
Speaker 2: counties are overwhelming the African American And when you look

1186
00:57:24,280 --> 00:57:27,000
Speaker 2: at the election results for the twenty twenty election, where

1187
00:57:27,040 --> 00:57:29,479
Speaker 2: Georgia becomes this pivotal state and also is the reason

1188
00:57:29,520 --> 00:57:32,200
Speaker 2: why the Democrats hold onto the Senate, if you map

1189
00:57:32,240 --> 00:57:35,200
Speaker 2: the county level election results, you will see the swoop

1190
00:57:35,560 --> 00:57:38,240
Speaker 2: of the ancient inlan Sea and it's exactly where the

1191
00:57:38,240 --> 00:57:41,120
Speaker 2: Democrats carried the state because it's where the black population,

1192
00:57:41,160 --> 00:57:44,840
Speaker 2: which is disproportionately likely to vote for Democrats, lives. And

1193
00:57:44,880 --> 00:57:46,120
Speaker 2: so you know this is the kind of stuff where,

1194
00:57:46,120 --> 00:57:47,880
Speaker 2: of course this is the long stretch of history, but

1195
00:57:47,880 --> 00:57:50,360
Speaker 2: it's something where I think we don't think about geological

1196
00:57:50,440 --> 00:57:54,320
Speaker 2: or geographical forces, and they do affect our politics. It's

1197
00:57:54,360 --> 00:57:56,560
Speaker 2: just that we're completely oblivious to them, and they're not

1198
00:57:56,600 --> 00:57:59,200
Speaker 2: that changing from election to election, so we're not fixating

1199
00:57:59,200 --> 00:58:00,400
Speaker 2: them for punditry.

1200
00:58:00,160 --> 00:58:04,920
Speaker 1: So your book forced me, as I was prepping for this,

1201
00:58:05,560 --> 00:58:10,880
Speaker 1: to go back in time and rethink what's contingent, what's convergent.

1202
00:58:11,480 --> 00:58:13,720
Speaker 1: And as I was prepping this, I'm going to ask

1203
00:58:13,760 --> 00:58:16,280
Speaker 1: you about January sixth and Ukraine and Gaza. But before

1204
00:58:16,320 --> 00:58:18,560
Speaker 1: I get to those questions, I want to stay with

1205
00:58:18,680 --> 00:58:22,200
Speaker 1: Trump in twenty sixteen and Trump in twenty twenty. As

1206
00:58:22,240 --> 00:58:27,040
Speaker 1: I was reading your language about the long fabric of

1207
00:58:27,280 --> 00:58:35,600
Speaker 1: threads in history, the conversation unrelated had talked about Iraq

1208
00:58:35,680 --> 00:58:39,200
Speaker 1: in two thousand and three, and as I'm plowing through

1209
00:58:39,200 --> 00:58:42,600
Speaker 1: the book, it sort of dawns on me the changes

1210
00:58:42,640 --> 00:58:46,360
Speaker 1: that are put into place under the Bush administration with

1211
00:58:46,440 --> 00:58:52,480
Speaker 1: Dick Cheney after nine to eleven, which essentially comes out

1212
00:58:52,520 --> 00:58:56,680
Speaker 1: of Afghanistan. Iraq had nothing to do with this. The

1213
00:58:56,720 --> 00:58:59,520
Speaker 1: idea that we're going to use this to invade a

1214
00:58:59,560 --> 00:59:03,040
Speaker 1: country that's not related to nine to eleven and just

1215
00:59:03,320 --> 00:59:07,200
Speaker 1: the ginned up weapons of mass destruction and all the

1216
00:59:07,240 --> 00:59:10,120
Speaker 1: evidence that turned out to be no evidence at all.

1217
00:59:10,800 --> 00:59:13,720
Speaker 1: That was at the time felt like a radical change.

1218
00:59:13,720 --> 00:59:16,840
Speaker 1: That the government was not just lying to us about

1219
00:59:16,880 --> 00:59:19,920
Speaker 1: little things we weren't paying attention to. They were like

1220
00:59:20,160 --> 00:59:24,400
Speaker 1: clearly not telling the truth, which most of us either

1221
00:59:24,400 --> 00:59:26,640
Speaker 1: didn't believe or didn't want to believe at the time.

1222
00:59:27,160 --> 00:59:29,560
Speaker 1: Of course, there's got to be some reason to invade

1223
00:59:29,560 --> 00:59:32,640
Speaker 1: a country. The Government's not just gonna make that up.

1224
00:59:32,680 --> 00:59:35,480
Speaker 1: And I'm wondering if that is that a contingent. Is

1225
00:59:35,480 --> 00:59:43,720
Speaker 1: that a convergence, because following the Bush Cheney administration, Donald

1226
00:59:43,760 --> 00:59:48,080
Speaker 1: Trump was kind of radical. But for that, I think

1227
00:59:48,120 --> 00:59:51,760
Speaker 1: if the Iraq War doesn't happen, and if the presentation

1228
00:59:52,360 --> 00:59:55,040
Speaker 1: by Colin Powell at the UN doesn't happen and the

1229
00:59:55,080 --> 00:59:58,959
Speaker 1: whole thing turns out to be bs afterwards, I think

1230
00:59:58,960 --> 01:00:02,560
Speaker 1: that kind of made people a little cynical and Trump

1231
01:00:02,720 --> 01:00:05,920
Speaker 1: was a modest step from that, whereas if that doesn't happen,

1232
01:00:06,000 --> 01:00:07,760
Speaker 1: Trump is a radical leap from that.

1233
01:00:07,960 --> 01:00:10,280
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So the Iraq War is a great example

1234
01:00:10,280 --> 01:00:12,440
Speaker 2: of this because I would go back even further to

1235
01:00:12,480 --> 01:00:16,600
Speaker 2: the First Golf War as the as Lady ninety one. Yes, exactly, yes,

1236
01:00:16,680 --> 01:00:18,600
Speaker 2: And I think this is an important part of the

1237
01:00:18,640 --> 01:00:22,600
Speaker 2: story that leads to Bush Junior going into Iraq in

1238
01:00:22,600 --> 01:00:26,320
Speaker 2: two thousand and three. So when Saddam Hussein was thinking

1239
01:00:26,320 --> 01:00:29,160
Speaker 2: about invading Kuwait in the early nineteen nineties, the US

1240
01:00:29,240 --> 01:00:32,000
Speaker 2: government wanted to tell him that if they if he

1241
01:00:32,040 --> 01:00:34,360
Speaker 2: did this, they would attack him. But there were two

1242
01:00:34,360 --> 01:00:36,920
Speaker 2: messages sent through diplomatic channels. One was called the Gillespie

1243
01:00:36,960 --> 01:00:39,240
Speaker 2: Memo and the other one was a sort of official communicate,

1244
01:00:40,240 --> 01:00:42,920
Speaker 2: and one of them was a little bit more lenient

1245
01:00:42,960 --> 01:00:45,720
Speaker 2: than the other. It sort of sounded like, we will

1246
01:00:45,720 --> 01:00:48,280
Speaker 2: disapprove of this, but you know, we won't attack you.

1247
01:00:48,640 --> 01:00:50,600
Speaker 2: That was the sort of subtext of it, whereas the

1248
01:00:50,600 --> 01:00:52,920
Speaker 2: other one was like, we will attack you. And what

1249
01:00:53,000 --> 01:00:56,440
Speaker 2: happened was because there were these two signals, Saddam Hussein

1250
01:00:56,480 --> 01:00:58,080
Speaker 2: picked the one that he thought was correct, and the

1251
01:00:58,120 --> 01:00:59,520
Speaker 2: one that he thought was correct was they're not going

1252
01:00:59,560 --> 01:01:02,120
Speaker 2: to do anything. So when you look at the reason

1253
01:01:02,160 --> 01:01:03,920
Speaker 2: why he invades and then gets wiped out, I mean

1254
01:01:03,920 --> 01:01:07,040
Speaker 2: you can look at the casualty numbers, it's like so ridiculously.

1255
01:01:07,080 --> 01:01:09,360
Speaker 2: It's probably the most lopsided conflict in modern history.

1256
01:01:09,480 --> 01:01:09,640
Speaker 1: Right.

1257
01:01:11,440 --> 01:01:15,800
Speaker 2: This origin story goes back to a misinterpretation of two

1258
01:01:15,880 --> 01:01:19,840
Speaker 2: conflicting signals that the US government basically miss He miscalculated based

1259
01:01:19,840 --> 01:01:23,680
Speaker 2: on a misinterpretation of a diplomatic signal. If that doesn't happen,

1260
01:01:23,760 --> 01:01:25,800
Speaker 2: you know, then you don't have the Bush connection to Iraq.

1261
01:01:26,000 --> 01:01:28,800
Speaker 2: You know, there's all these questions of what will happen now.

1262
01:01:29,440 --> 01:01:31,120
Speaker 2: I think there's there's a bigger point that I wanted

1263
01:01:31,160 --> 01:01:33,560
Speaker 2: to get into here, which I think is where I

1264
01:01:33,600 --> 01:01:35,400
Speaker 2: think about this differently from some other people. And I

1265
01:01:35,440 --> 01:01:37,200
Speaker 2: realized this when I was talking about the book. So

1266
01:01:37,200 --> 01:01:40,240
Speaker 2: I told a historian friend of mine the story of Kyoto, right,

1267
01:01:40,560 --> 01:01:42,480
Speaker 2: and how Kyoto doesn't get blown up in the atomic

1268
01:01:42,480 --> 01:01:45,960
Speaker 2: bomb from this vacation. And he says, okay, but hold on, like,

1269
01:01:46,040 --> 01:01:47,720
Speaker 2: the US is still going to win the war, right,

1270
01:01:47,760 --> 01:01:48,960
Speaker 2: Like it doesn't. Like, I mean, at the end of

1271
01:01:49,000 --> 01:01:50,520
Speaker 2: the day, if they drop the bomb on Kyoto, they'ld

1272
01:01:50,560 --> 01:01:51,960
Speaker 2: drop the bomb in Erosia, They're still going to win

1273
01:01:52,000 --> 01:01:54,480
Speaker 2: the war. I'm like, yes, that's true. The problem I

1274
01:01:54,520 --> 01:01:56,080
Speaker 2: think we make when we think about these things is

1275
01:01:56,120 --> 01:01:59,280
Speaker 2: we impose categories that don't really exist because there's a

1276
01:01:59,280 --> 01:02:01,320
Speaker 2: binary of whether you win the war or not. But

1277
01:02:01,360 --> 01:02:04,840
Speaker 2: the question is does Japan develop in the same way

1278
01:02:04,920 --> 01:02:08,160
Speaker 2: if you swap out Kyoto for Hiroshima. I don't think so, right,

1279
01:02:08,160 --> 01:02:10,880
Speaker 2: there's totally different people who live and die. And also

1280
01:02:10,920 --> 01:02:13,120
Speaker 2: one of the people who's one of the founding you know,

1281
01:02:13,200 --> 01:02:17,080
Speaker 2: scientists of modern meteorology was in Kyoto, so like he

1282
01:02:17,120 --> 01:02:19,200
Speaker 2: would have probably died. And this is a lot of

1283
01:02:19,200 --> 01:02:22,320
Speaker 2: the stuff that ends up helping us basically detect major storms.

1284
01:02:22,560 --> 01:02:24,320
Speaker 2: So you think there's I mean, even that's just a

1285
01:02:24,360 --> 01:02:26,400
Speaker 2: small ripple effect that we can imagine that. Okay, maybe

1286
01:02:26,480 --> 01:02:29,160
Speaker 2: mederology goes a little bit differently. So you know, what

1287
01:02:29,240 --> 01:02:30,720
Speaker 2: I think about with some of this stuff is like,

1288
01:02:31,080 --> 01:02:33,040
Speaker 2: you know, do we end up invading Iraq or not?

1289
01:02:33,160 --> 01:02:35,560
Speaker 2: Maybe we still do. Maybe that's the convergence. Maybe there's

1290
01:02:35,560 --> 01:02:38,600
Speaker 2: still a war, But the way it happens matters, And

1291
01:02:38,640 --> 01:02:41,040
Speaker 2: I think, you know, the way the conflict unfolds, the

1292
01:02:41,040 --> 01:02:43,960
Speaker 2: way that the losses accrue, the way that you know,

1293
01:02:44,800 --> 01:02:47,640
Speaker 2: the way the US had relationships with Osama bin Laden

1294
01:02:47,680 --> 01:02:49,520
Speaker 2: when he was a you know, a fighter in Afghanistan,

1295
01:02:49,560 --> 01:02:52,600
Speaker 2: and it I mean all this stuff matters, and I

1296
01:02:52,600 --> 01:02:54,280
Speaker 2: think the thing that we tend to do is we

1297
01:02:54,320 --> 01:02:56,200
Speaker 2: tend to just say, well, it would have been the same,

1298
01:02:56,240 --> 01:03:00,120
Speaker 2: because in our category, which is a fake construction and

1299
01:03:00,160 --> 01:03:01,960
Speaker 2: of the way we think about the world, it's the

1300
01:03:02,000 --> 01:03:04,960
Speaker 2: same binary outcome, Right, you win the war, you don't.

1301
01:03:05,440 --> 01:03:07,720
Speaker 2: But the way you win the war actually affects the future.

1302
01:03:07,760 --> 01:03:09,240
Speaker 2: And so that's the kind of stuff I think. I'm

1303
01:03:09,280 --> 01:03:11,000
Speaker 2: sure that people in business understand this as well, where

1304
01:03:11,040 --> 01:03:13,800
Speaker 2: it's like, you know, the way that a product launches, Yeah,

1305
01:03:13,840 --> 01:03:16,480
Speaker 2: it's a success, but if it's five percent more of

1306
01:03:16,520 --> 01:03:18,520
Speaker 2: a success, that might affect the way that you behave

1307
01:03:18,560 --> 01:03:20,200
Speaker 2: in your future investments, and then that's going to have

1308
01:03:20,280 --> 01:03:21,320
Speaker 2: ripple effects in the future.

1309
01:03:21,640 --> 01:03:23,920
Speaker 1: The way you win the war or not is the

1310
01:03:23,920 --> 01:03:29,080
Speaker 1: theme of liqud. A'mat's book Lords of Finance. The conditions

1311
01:03:29,080 --> 01:03:33,440
Speaker 1: that were imposed after World War One. Yep, pretty directly

1312
01:03:33,560 --> 01:03:36,840
Speaker 1: leads to Germany and World War Two. But for those

1313
01:03:37,280 --> 01:03:41,680
Speaker 1: very stringent conditions that lead to Germany being broken and

1314
01:03:41,680 --> 01:03:44,560
Speaker 1: then the rise of the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republican

1315
01:03:45,520 --> 01:03:49,640
Speaker 1: that was a series of choices, and he very brilliantly

1316
01:03:49,680 --> 01:03:54,400
Speaker 1: tells the story of this was absolutely not convergent. It

1317
01:03:54,440 --> 01:03:55,640
Speaker 1: didn't have to happen that way.

1318
01:03:55,720 --> 01:03:58,120
Speaker 2: Well, the story that is famous about World War One

1319
01:03:58,160 --> 01:04:01,120
Speaker 2: is how Archiduke Franz ferdinance car breaks down right in

1320
01:04:01,120 --> 01:04:04,120
Speaker 2: front of the assassin who kills him. It's a complete accident, right.

1321
01:04:04,480 --> 01:04:06,560
Speaker 2: I actually found a different contingency that I think is

1322
01:04:06,560 --> 01:04:09,080
Speaker 2: even more bewildering, which is that Franz Ferda and the

1323
01:04:09,160 --> 01:04:12,840
Speaker 2: Archduke goes to England about I think several months before

1324
01:04:12,880 --> 01:04:16,800
Speaker 2: he's actually killed in Sarajevo, and he ends up on

1325
01:04:16,840 --> 01:04:19,920
Speaker 2: a hunting expedition at this place called Welbeck Abbey, and

1326
01:04:20,080 --> 01:04:23,360
Speaker 2: the person who's loading the shotguns slips because there's just

1327
01:04:23,360 --> 01:04:26,040
Speaker 2: been a snowstorm, and the gun goes off and a

1328
01:04:26,080 --> 01:04:29,040
Speaker 2: bullet goes right over the shoulder of the Archduke and

1329
01:04:29,120 --> 01:04:32,160
Speaker 2: misses him by like three inches. And you think to yourself, Okay,

1330
01:04:32,160 --> 01:04:34,120
Speaker 2: So if this guy slips in a slightly different way

1331
01:04:34,160 --> 01:04:36,640
Speaker 2: and hits him in the head and the trigger event

1332
01:04:36,720 --> 01:04:40,240
Speaker 2: of World War One is instead dead already in Wellbeck Abbey,

1333
01:04:40,360 --> 01:04:42,160
Speaker 2: does World War One happen? Now? This is a debate

1334
01:04:42,160 --> 01:04:45,560
Speaker 2: that historians really can't answer, and there's lots of people

1335
01:04:45,560 --> 01:04:47,440
Speaker 2: on both sides of the argument. And I think the

1336
01:04:47,920 --> 01:04:51,000
Speaker 2: point is maybe World War one still happens, but if

1337
01:04:51,000 --> 01:04:53,439
Speaker 2: it's not triggered by this assassination, the way the war

1338
01:04:53,800 --> 01:04:55,560
Speaker 2: is going to unfold is going to be different. Does

1339
01:04:55,600 --> 01:04:57,200
Speaker 2: it lead to Nazi Germany the same? I mean, these

1340
01:04:57,200 --> 01:04:59,240
Speaker 2: are the things where I think what we do is

1341
01:04:59,280 --> 01:05:01,800
Speaker 2: we just pretend these things don't matter that much because

1342
01:05:01,840 --> 01:05:04,440
Speaker 2: it's so overwhelming. I mean, if the idea that somebody

1343
01:05:04,560 --> 01:05:06,640
Speaker 2: slipping is the response, you know, is sort of the

1344
01:05:06,760 --> 01:05:09,720
Speaker 2: proximate cause of millions of deaths and then the rise

1345
01:05:09,760 --> 01:05:12,479
Speaker 2: of Nazism. I mean, this is the kind of stuff

1346
01:05:12,480 --> 01:05:14,800
Speaker 2: where it's just so overwhelming that you mnd blow in.

1347
01:05:14,920 --> 01:05:18,600
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let me throw some more again your political science.

1348
01:05:18,960 --> 01:05:22,800
Speaker 1: Let's talk about some some recent political actions that are

1349
01:05:22,840 --> 01:05:26,520
Speaker 1: kind of fascinating and ask the question, is this convergence

1350
01:05:26,600 --> 01:05:30,040
Speaker 1: or contingency the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

1351
01:05:30,640 --> 01:05:33,480
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I think this is uh, it's they're

1352
01:05:33,480 --> 01:05:36,240
Speaker 2: always both. But the convergence of this is the sort

1353
01:05:36,280 --> 01:05:40,400
Speaker 2: of long standing humiliation of Russia that Vladimir Putin has

1354
01:05:40,440 --> 01:05:43,240
Speaker 2: a very big chip on his shoulder about, you know,

1355
01:05:43,280 --> 01:05:45,560
Speaker 2: sort of the fact that he has this predisposition to

1356
01:05:45,640 --> 01:05:47,760
Speaker 2: view Russia as a major global power because he was

1357
01:05:47,760 --> 01:05:49,960
Speaker 2: in the KGB and so on. You know that I

1358
01:05:49,960 --> 01:05:52,120
Speaker 2: think is a long term trend. And like Trump, sorry,

1359
01:05:52,160 --> 01:05:55,480
Speaker 2: Putin was always very very keen on reestablishing Russian dominance.

1360
01:05:56,000 --> 01:05:57,760
Speaker 2: But I think there was some stuff where there was

1361
01:05:57,800 --> 01:06:00,640
Speaker 2: some serious miscalculations going on, and this is where the

1362
01:06:00,800 --> 01:06:03,760
Speaker 2: contingencies I think could have cropped up. So I wrote

1363
01:06:03,760 --> 01:06:05,760
Speaker 2: a piece for The Atlantic in twenty twenty two right

1364
01:06:05,760 --> 01:06:10,600
Speaker 2: after the invasion happened, where it was like, look, what

1365
01:06:10,640 --> 01:06:14,080
Speaker 2: happens with dictators is they purge all the people who

1366
01:06:14,160 --> 01:06:17,240
Speaker 2: challenge them and tell them the truth, nothing but yes men, exactly.

1367
01:06:17,240 --> 01:06:19,760
Speaker 2: And this happens over decades. So the fact that Putin

1368
01:06:19,800 --> 01:06:22,000
Speaker 2: stayed in power for so long, he probably got some

1369
01:06:22,040 --> 01:06:24,080
Speaker 2: really bad information that told them, look, it's going to

1370
01:06:24,080 --> 01:06:26,880
Speaker 2: be three day war, and then he miscalculates based on this, and.

1371
01:06:26,840 --> 01:06:31,120
Speaker 1: Ill look back at the annexation of Crimea that kind

1372
01:06:31,120 --> 01:06:32,520
Speaker 1: of was a three day war exactly.

1373
01:06:32,600 --> 01:06:36,400
Speaker 2: And this is where I think the aspects of contingency

1374
01:06:36,880 --> 01:06:40,280
Speaker 2: are tied to the personality traits of leaders sometimes and

1375
01:06:40,360 --> 01:06:42,160
Speaker 2: if you have a different Russian president, maybe he doesn't

1376
01:06:42,160 --> 01:06:43,400
Speaker 2: do the same thing, right, And I think this is

1377
01:06:43,400 --> 01:06:46,880
Speaker 2: the kind of stuff where political science, you know, this

1378
01:06:46,920 --> 01:06:48,800
Speaker 2: is a little bit of inside baseball. Political science is

1379
01:06:48,840 --> 01:06:52,480
Speaker 2: obsessed with institutions. We tried to explain through institutions, and

1380
01:06:52,480 --> 01:06:54,520
Speaker 2: there was a long standing viewpoint. This speaks to, you know,

1381
01:06:54,600 --> 01:06:57,000
Speaker 2: January sixth and Trump and all these other things, that

1382
01:06:57,160 --> 01:06:59,920
Speaker 2: the institution of the president matters, not the president themselves.

1383
01:07:00,640 --> 01:07:03,760
Speaker 2: And I think Trump obliterated this mentality. Putin also obliterates

1384
01:07:03,760 --> 01:07:05,600
Speaker 2: this mentality. Nobody thinks the world would be the same

1385
01:07:05,720 --> 01:07:07,120
Speaker 2: Hillary Clinton had one in twenty.

1386
01:07:06,920 --> 01:07:09,240
Speaker 1: Sixteen, clearly very different, and you could say the same

1387
01:07:09,280 --> 01:07:12,320
Speaker 1: thing about Bush versus Gore completely. I think the world

1388
01:07:12,480 --> 01:07:15,680
Speaker 1: it feels like we took a different track following the

1389
01:07:15,680 --> 01:07:17,040
Speaker 1: two thousand election as well.

1390
01:07:17,160 --> 01:07:18,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think this is where we make the mistake.

1391
01:07:18,800 --> 01:07:21,840
Speaker 2: I mean, contingency is obviously amplified for people in power.

1392
01:07:22,000 --> 01:07:26,240
Speaker 2: Hierarchies make contingency more more influential and on a shorter

1393
01:07:26,320 --> 01:07:29,480
Speaker 2: time scales. But everyone is affecting the world in some way, right,

1394
01:07:29,520 --> 01:07:31,080
Speaker 2: I mean, like we all have. As I say, we

1395
01:07:31,120 --> 01:07:34,000
Speaker 2: control nothing but influence everything. I mean that for ordinary people.

1396
01:07:33,760 --> 01:07:36,520
Speaker 1: Say that again, we control nothing but influence everything.

1397
01:07:36,600 --> 01:07:38,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that what this means is that

1398
01:07:38,440 --> 01:07:41,800
Speaker 2: we cannot control anything. There's nothing that we have absolute

1399
01:07:41,840 --> 01:07:44,200
Speaker 2: control over, but everything that we do has ripple effects.

1400
01:07:44,240 --> 01:07:46,960
Speaker 2: Every single action we make has ripple effects. The question

1401
01:07:47,080 --> 01:07:50,520
Speaker 2: is on what timescale are those important and how much

1402
01:07:50,560 --> 01:07:53,000
Speaker 2: are they affecting people around the world. So when Joe

1403
01:07:53,040 --> 01:07:56,840
Speaker 2: Biden does something, the contingency of that is highly probable

1404
01:07:56,880 --> 01:07:59,440
Speaker 2: that it will affect lots and lots of people. Whereas

1405
01:07:59,480 --> 01:08:01,560
Speaker 2: if you're somebody who's a hermit living in the forest,

1406
01:08:01,880 --> 01:08:03,840
Speaker 2: it's not going to affect that many people right away.

1407
01:08:04,120 --> 01:08:06,400
Speaker 2: Is it going to affect nobody? No, because if that

1408
01:08:06,480 --> 01:08:08,720
Speaker 2: hermit went and met somebody else, they would have a baby,

1409
01:08:08,720 --> 01:08:10,920
Speaker 2: and that baby might you know, rise up to you know,

1410
01:08:11,080 --> 01:08:13,200
Speaker 2: change the world, and who knows. So I think the

1411
01:08:13,320 --> 01:08:16,080
Speaker 2: idea is that everyone is influencing the future all the time.

1412
01:08:16,520 --> 01:08:18,880
Speaker 2: The question is just on what timescale and how many

1413
01:08:18,920 --> 01:08:20,639
Speaker 2: people will be affected in a way that we think

1414
01:08:20,720 --> 01:08:21,480
Speaker 2: is consequential.

1415
01:08:21,520 --> 01:08:25,840
Speaker 1: So you mentioned January sixth, That feels more like it's

1416
01:08:25,880 --> 01:08:30,679
Speaker 1: a contingency. But you're implying a lot of these things

1417
01:08:30,760 --> 01:08:34,360
Speaker 1: are convergent and might have happened given all the events

1418
01:08:34,360 --> 01:08:35,560
Speaker 1: that took place beforehand.

1419
01:08:35,760 --> 01:08:37,880
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think the build up to January sixth

1420
01:08:38,000 --> 01:08:40,960
Speaker 2: was I think relatively predictable. I wrote a column actually

1421
01:08:41,240 --> 01:08:42,840
Speaker 2: about six months before it, where I said, look, I

1422
01:08:42,840 --> 01:08:44,600
Speaker 2: think there's going to be violence between the election and

1423
01:08:44,600 --> 01:08:47,560
Speaker 2: the inauguration, significant political violence between the election and the inauguration.

1424
01:08:47,880 --> 01:08:50,519
Speaker 2: And it wasn't like, it wasn't something that was completely

1425
01:08:50,560 --> 01:08:52,679
Speaker 2: out of left field. It was possible that these forces

1426
01:08:52,720 --> 01:08:53,960
Speaker 2: were amassing.

1427
01:08:54,520 --> 01:08:54,720
Speaker 1: You know.

1428
01:08:54,760 --> 01:08:57,000
Speaker 2: I think the contingency is there were a few of

1429
01:08:57,000 --> 01:08:59,759
Speaker 2: the people in the group that took over the capital

1430
01:08:59,840 --> 01:09:03,600
Speaker 2: that had zip tizze and were trying to kidnap politicians

1431
01:09:03,640 --> 01:09:06,759
Speaker 2: hang like Pennce. Yeah, and you know there are videos

1432
01:09:06,760 --> 01:09:08,720
Speaker 2: you can see in that in the in the CCTV

1433
01:09:08,840 --> 01:09:11,960
Speaker 2: where they were close, and you know, how does how

1434
01:09:12,000 --> 01:09:14,720
Speaker 2: does American politics unfold if somebody actually gets killed in that?

1435
01:09:15,320 --> 01:09:17,880
Speaker 2: I mean, there's there's a lot of things where you know,

1436
01:09:18,000 --> 01:09:19,880
Speaker 2: they kill a senior politician or something, and that's going

1437
01:09:19,920 --> 01:09:22,080
Speaker 2: to change the dynamics of the country. I think that

1438
01:09:22,120 --> 01:09:24,240
Speaker 2: if they had had a you know, if the if

1439
01:09:24,280 --> 01:09:27,080
Speaker 2: the outcome of January sixth had been worse in that regard,

1440
01:09:27,200 --> 01:09:29,599
Speaker 2: if there had been a senior politician murdered by somebody

1441
01:09:29,600 --> 01:09:32,960
Speaker 2: in the in the in the group. You know, that

1442
01:09:33,040 --> 01:09:35,960
Speaker 2: would have been harder for Trump to recover from Politically.

1443
01:09:35,600 --> 01:09:39,479
Speaker 1: I think I was surprised how quickly he recovered trust.

1444
01:09:40,080 --> 01:09:43,240
Speaker 1: What looked like, you know, from my perspective, the game

1445
01:09:43,320 --> 01:09:48,000
Speaker 1: theory was, Hey, I'm a conservative Republican and I'm against

1446
01:09:48,040 --> 01:09:50,879
Speaker 1: abortion and in favor of tax cuts. I got everything

1447
01:09:50,920 --> 01:09:53,800
Speaker 1: I want from Trump. Let's throw them under the bus

1448
01:09:53,800 --> 01:09:56,760
Speaker 1: and move on. We could retake our party. I was

1449
01:09:56,840 --> 01:10:03,000
Speaker 1: shocked at that a principle didn't permeate the Republican right

1450
01:10:03,280 --> 01:10:06,599
Speaker 1: because it looked like, in real time, Hey, you guys

1451
01:10:06,640 --> 01:10:08,880
Speaker 1: don't need this guy anymore. He just did you a

1452
01:10:08,920 --> 01:10:09,559
Speaker 1: huge favor.

1453
01:10:10,000 --> 01:10:11,600
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and this is also where, you know, the

1454
01:10:11,680 --> 01:10:15,280
Speaker 2: dynamics of contingency play into this in a huge way,

1455
01:10:15,320 --> 01:10:17,360
Speaker 2: because part of the anger that I think exists on

1456
01:10:17,360 --> 01:10:20,200
Speaker 2: the political right is the backlash to policies during the

1457
01:10:20,240 --> 01:10:22,960
Speaker 2: pandemic and some of the information that people in the

1458
01:10:23,000 --> 01:10:26,519
Speaker 2: Republican Party share about the pandemic and so on, And

1459
01:10:26,760 --> 01:10:29,400
Speaker 2: that is a single person in China getting infected by

1460
01:10:29,400 --> 01:10:31,000
Speaker 2: a mutation of a virus, you know what I mean.

1461
01:10:31,240 --> 01:10:33,040
Speaker 2: So like, you know, you think about the twenty twenty race.

1462
01:10:33,080 --> 01:10:35,880
Speaker 2: I mean, it is affected profoundly by one person getting sick.

1463
01:10:36,120 --> 01:10:39,120
Speaker 1: Right. My argument has long been that but for the

1464
01:10:39,120 --> 01:10:44,040
Speaker 1: mishandling of COVID, he would have easily cruised to reelection. Yeah.

1465
01:10:44,040 --> 01:10:46,639
Speaker 1: I mean of he was fine pre COVID, and people

1466
01:10:46,680 --> 01:10:48,080
Speaker 1: tend to vote their pocepo Yeah.

1467
01:10:48,320 --> 01:10:49,760
Speaker 2: And this is the stuff where I think we just

1468
01:10:49,840 --> 01:10:52,840
Speaker 2: can never know, but I I know. My point is

1469
01:10:52,840 --> 01:10:56,879
Speaker 2: that when you accept that these things are so fragile,

1470
01:10:57,600 --> 01:11:00,439
Speaker 2: the hubrist that comes with it is reduced because you

1471
01:11:00,479 --> 01:11:03,640
Speaker 2: start to think, Okay, A, this is not inevitable. B

1472
01:11:03,840 --> 01:11:06,640
Speaker 2: I didn't control this completely. And see, because it's so

1473
01:11:07,600 --> 01:11:13,400
Speaker 2: derived from contingency, maybe I shouldn't over confidently try to

1474
01:11:13,439 --> 01:11:15,840
Speaker 2: manipulate the system. I think these are the things where,

1475
01:11:15,880 --> 01:11:18,000
Speaker 2: like you know, some people will think will be listening

1476
01:11:18,040 --> 01:11:19,000
Speaker 2: to me and say, oh, this is a bit of

1477
01:11:19,040 --> 01:11:20,960
Speaker 2: a parlor game. These are all thought experiments, et cetera.

1478
01:11:21,120 --> 01:11:23,120
Speaker 2: I think the lesson, the important lesson, is that when

1479
01:11:23,160 --> 01:11:26,479
Speaker 2: you accept these strange happenstance events the way chaos theory

1480
01:11:26,479 --> 01:11:31,120
Speaker 2: actually works in social systems, you have an appreciation for

1481
01:11:31,160 --> 01:11:34,160
Speaker 2: the fact that you simply cannot control anything. And when

1482
01:11:34,240 --> 01:11:36,920
Speaker 2: you accept that you live in a world where you

1483
01:11:36,920 --> 01:11:39,280
Speaker 2: are more likely to focus on resilience and less likely

1484
01:11:39,320 --> 01:11:41,720
Speaker 2: to focus on optimization to the absolute work.

1485
01:11:41,920 --> 01:11:47,240
Speaker 1: So last two random examples I want to ask about. First.

1486
01:11:47,560 --> 01:11:50,719
Speaker 1: I love the example you give of Keith Jarrett live

1487
01:11:50,760 --> 01:11:53,920
Speaker 1: at the Opera House in Germany. He's supposed to come

1488
01:11:53,960 --> 01:11:59,160
Speaker 1: in and play on a beautiful, you know, concert piano.

1489
01:11:59,280 --> 01:12:02,799
Speaker 1: Instead he shows up, there's an old, rickety attitude piano,

1490
01:12:03,360 --> 01:12:08,280
Speaker 1: and he has to improvise around broken keys and attitude notes.

1491
01:12:08,800 --> 01:12:12,200
Speaker 1: This becomes the best selling solo jazz album in history.

1492
01:12:12,479 --> 01:12:15,160
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is the lesson of how sometimes forced

1493
01:12:15,200 --> 01:12:18,479
Speaker 2: experimentation can be really good for innovation. So you know,

1494
01:12:18,520 --> 01:12:21,400
Speaker 2: this guy, basically you know, plays a crappy piano and

1495
01:12:21,520 --> 01:12:24,559
Speaker 2: ends up producing something incredible. He never would have chosen

1496
01:12:24,600 --> 01:12:26,519
Speaker 2: to do that. It was forced on him, right, it

1497
01:12:26,520 --> 01:12:28,760
Speaker 2: was an accident. Now, one of my favorite studies that's

1498
01:12:28,800 --> 01:12:30,960
Speaker 2: around that section of the book is a study about

1499
01:12:31,160 --> 01:12:34,200
Speaker 2: a tube strike in London where they've geolocated all the

1500
01:12:34,280 --> 01:12:36,479
Speaker 2: data of the commuters and they look at these anonymous

1501
01:12:36,479 --> 01:12:39,680
Speaker 2: cell phone data pathways to work and everybody has to

1502
01:12:39,680 --> 01:12:41,479
Speaker 2: find a different way to work because the subway system

1503
01:12:41,520 --> 01:12:43,479
Speaker 2: has just been shut down by these drivers on strike.

1504
01:12:43,840 --> 01:12:45,919
Speaker 2: What they found is that five percent of the commuters

1505
01:12:46,000 --> 01:12:48,759
Speaker 2: stuck with the new pathway to work after the strike

1506
01:12:49,000 --> 01:12:51,080
Speaker 2: because they were forced to sort of try something new

1507
01:12:51,120 --> 01:12:53,720
Speaker 2: and they realized they've liked the new alternative. And I

1508
01:12:53,760 --> 01:12:56,320
Speaker 2: think this is something where because of optimization in our lives,

1509
01:12:56,320 --> 01:12:58,320
Speaker 2: you know, we're always looking for the trip Advisor quote

1510
01:12:58,360 --> 01:13:01,679
Speaker 2: or you know, the perfect way on maps, you experiment less.

1511
01:13:01,840 --> 01:13:04,320
Speaker 2: And when you experiment less, you actually find that you

1512
01:13:04,600 --> 01:13:06,640
Speaker 2: don't navigate uncertainty as well. And I think this is

1513
01:13:06,640 --> 01:13:09,160
Speaker 2: the lesson again. It brings us back to evolution. The

1514
01:13:09,160 --> 01:13:12,519
Speaker 2: wisdom of evolution is experimentation through uncertainty, and I think

1515
01:13:12,520 --> 01:13:17,000
Speaker 2: that's where humans, when they have hubris, experiment less and

1516
01:13:17,040 --> 01:13:19,000
Speaker 2: become less resilient. And I think it's a very important

1517
01:13:19,040 --> 01:13:19,559
Speaker 2: lesson for us.

1518
01:13:19,640 --> 01:13:22,120
Speaker 1: All Right, so now I'm gonna get super wonky on you,

1519
01:13:22,600 --> 01:13:27,559
Speaker 1: and you use the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. You

1520
01:13:27,640 --> 01:13:32,599
Speaker 1: have a demon that has perfect knowledge of every atom

1521
01:13:32,800 --> 01:13:36,400
Speaker 1: in the universe, but I and because of that precise detail,

1522
01:13:36,600 --> 01:13:39,120
Speaker 1: they know everything that's happened, they know everything that's going

1523
01:13:39,160 --> 01:13:41,960
Speaker 1: on right now, and they know that everything that's gonna happen.

1524
01:13:42,120 --> 01:13:45,960
Speaker 1: Let me throw a curveball at you. The latest findings

1525
01:13:46,120 --> 01:13:52,360
Speaker 1: from quantum research and physics is that, well, you can

1526
01:13:52,520 --> 01:13:55,519
Speaker 1: know everything. You could know the location of electron or

1527
01:13:55,640 --> 01:14:00,800
Speaker 1: its spin and handedness, but not both. So that kind

1528
01:14:00,800 --> 01:14:04,880
Speaker 1: of raises the question. Even Laplace's thought experiment with the demon,

1529
01:14:05,920 --> 01:14:09,400
Speaker 1: there's too much randomness to for even an all knowing

1530
01:14:10,400 --> 01:14:12,360
Speaker 1: demon to be able to predict the future.

1531
01:14:12,400 --> 01:14:14,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're covering all the basis today. We got quantum mechanics. Now,

1532
01:14:15,000 --> 01:14:17,080
Speaker 2: so quantum mechanics, I mean, the thing is, it is

1533
01:14:17,120 --> 01:14:20,400
Speaker 2: absolutely the case that the scientific interpretation of highly verified

1534
01:14:20,400 --> 01:14:23,920
Speaker 2: experimental data is that probably the only genuinely random thing

1535
01:14:23,960 --> 01:14:26,360
Speaker 2: in the universe is quantum effects at the atomic and

1536
01:14:26,400 --> 01:14:29,639
Speaker 2: subatomic levels. Right now, the question is what does that mean?

1537
01:14:30,080 --> 01:14:32,719
Speaker 2: And so this is where things get very trippy, very quickly,

1538
01:14:32,720 --> 01:14:36,080
Speaker 2: because the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics where an

1539
01:14:36,120 --> 01:14:38,519
Speaker 2: infinite number of things that can happen do happen, and

1540
01:14:38,600 --> 01:14:41,880
Speaker 2: there's an infinite copy of you in infinite universes, right,

1541
01:14:42,600 --> 01:14:45,439
Speaker 2: that is still a deterministic universe where Laplace's demon could

1542
01:14:45,479 --> 01:14:48,960
Speaker 2: theoretically be true, right, because then you would know you

1543
01:14:49,040 --> 01:14:50,720
Speaker 2: just you wouldn't know which universe you were in, but

1544
01:14:50,760 --> 01:14:53,280
Speaker 2: it would be all the universes are happening all the time, right.

1545
01:14:53,560 --> 01:14:56,840
Speaker 2: Whereas if you take the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics

1546
01:14:56,920 --> 01:14:59,600
Speaker 2: DU to the Copenhagen interpretation, then yes, you have irreducible

1547
01:14:59,680 --> 01:15:04,400
Speaker 2: random indeterminism is correct, and therefore the plus's demon is nonsensical.

1548
01:15:04,840 --> 01:15:06,360
Speaker 2: So you know, I mean, there's lots of reasons why

1549
01:15:06,360 --> 01:15:08,280
Speaker 2: the plus's demon probably wouldn't work anyway that a lot

1550
01:15:08,280 --> 01:15:12,160
Speaker 2: of philosophers have objections to, but it is This is

1551
01:15:12,160 --> 01:15:14,960
Speaker 2: one of those fascinating questions I think, is that you know,

1552
01:15:15,040 --> 01:15:18,120
Speaker 2: we have this world where we believe we have more

1553
01:15:18,240 --> 01:15:22,240
Speaker 2: understanding than any you know, human ever alive, but the

1554
01:15:22,280 --> 01:15:24,680
Speaker 2: big questions are still completely uncertain to us. We don't

1555
01:15:24,760 --> 01:15:28,080
Speaker 2: understand consciousness, we have no idea what produces it, and

1556
01:15:28,120 --> 01:15:31,439
Speaker 2: we also don't understand anything about quantum mechanics in terms

1557
01:15:31,520 --> 01:15:33,720
Speaker 2: of what it actually means. And these are like the

1558
01:15:33,760 --> 01:15:36,519
Speaker 2: building blocks of our world, you know, I think that's

1559
01:15:36,560 --> 01:15:39,280
Speaker 2: pretty amazing to imagine that, and it gives us a

1560
01:15:39,280 --> 01:15:42,439
Speaker 2: healthy dose of sort of you know, a bit of

1561
01:15:42,840 --> 01:15:46,479
Speaker 2: humility because we just there's so much we still don't understand, but.

1562
01:15:46,520 --> 01:15:48,960
Speaker 1: Throw free will in that also, whether or not you

1563
01:15:49,120 --> 01:15:53,240
Speaker 1: right between the intersection of quantum mechanics and consciousness. You know,

1564
01:15:53,320 --> 01:15:57,479
Speaker 1: do we really control even our own agency? Forget the

1565
01:15:57,520 --> 01:16:00,280
Speaker 1: rest of the world. It's it's even more comp life.

1566
01:16:00,280 --> 01:16:03,120
Speaker 1: So I only have you for a handful of minutes,

1567
01:16:03,160 --> 01:16:06,120
Speaker 1: and I want to jump to my favorite questions that

1568
01:16:06,200 --> 01:16:11,560
Speaker 1: I ask all of my guests, starting with tell us, Uh,

1569
01:16:11,640 --> 01:16:14,040
Speaker 1: what you've been streaming these days? What are you watching

1570
01:16:14,160 --> 01:16:15,800
Speaker 1: or listening to? Yeah?

1571
01:16:16,080 --> 01:16:18,120
Speaker 2: My favorite show that I've been watching recently is called

1572
01:16:18,160 --> 01:16:22,240
Speaker 2: Slow Horses, the great TV Yeah, the great spy drama.

1573
01:16:22,400 --> 01:16:24,360
Speaker 2: And I've read all the books to which I highly

1574
01:16:24,400 --> 01:16:27,640
Speaker 2: recommend by Mick Herron. You know, I think there's uh

1575
01:16:28,680 --> 01:16:30,600
Speaker 2: in terms of in terms of podcasts if people are

1576
01:16:30,640 --> 01:16:32,639
Speaker 2: interested in some of the ideas that I've been talking about.

1577
01:16:33,280 --> 01:16:36,280
Speaker 2: There's a podcast called Mindscape by a physicist named Sean

1578
01:16:36,280 --> 01:16:37,960
Speaker 2: Carroll who's one of the main proponents of the many

1579
01:16:37,960 --> 01:16:41,240
Speaker 2: worlds hypothesis. It's nerdy. I'm not gonna lie you know

1580
01:16:41,280 --> 01:16:43,479
Speaker 2: this is it's a brainy podcast, but it's something where

1581
01:16:43,800 --> 01:16:46,959
Speaker 2: he brings on really smart people and ask them questions

1582
01:16:47,000 --> 01:16:49,240
Speaker 2: that only Sean Carroll could come up with as a

1583
01:16:49,360 --> 01:16:53,559
Speaker 2: highly highly informed quantum mechanics researcher, but about all sorts

1584
01:16:53,600 --> 01:16:57,479
Speaker 2: of things politics, economics, life, philosophy, et cetera. So I

1585
01:16:57,560 --> 01:16:59,120
Speaker 2: highly recommend the Mindscape podcast.

1586
01:16:59,479 --> 01:17:02,400
Speaker 1: Tell us about out your mentors who helped shape your career?

1587
01:17:03,439 --> 01:17:05,479
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I mean I think my mom was

1588
01:17:05,520 --> 01:17:07,800
Speaker 2: one of them. She decided to run for school board

1589
01:17:07,800 --> 01:17:09,800
Speaker 2: and that's probably the reason why I ended up interested

1590
01:17:09,800 --> 01:17:11,559
Speaker 2: in politics when I was eight years old and she

1591
01:17:11,600 --> 01:17:14,120
Speaker 2: decided to run for the local school board. You know,

1592
01:17:14,120 --> 01:17:15,720
Speaker 2: there's a lot of a lot of teachers I had.

1593
01:17:15,760 --> 01:17:19,160
Speaker 2: I think my main one, though, is my PhD advisor,

1594
01:17:19,680 --> 01:17:22,640
Speaker 2: Nick Cheeseman is his name. He's a professor previously at

1595
01:17:22,640 --> 01:17:25,400
Speaker 2: Oxford now at the University of Birmingham. We co wrote

1596
01:17:25,400 --> 01:17:27,040
Speaker 2: a book together called had to Rig An Election? And

1597
01:17:27,080 --> 01:17:29,920
Speaker 2: you know, I mean, what year was that. This came

1598
01:17:29,960 --> 01:17:34,320
Speaker 2: out in twenty eighteen, so it's all about election rigging

1599
01:17:34,320 --> 01:17:37,040
Speaker 2: around the world, but it's you know, he was one

1600
01:17:37,080 --> 01:17:38,840
Speaker 2: of these people who just like really taught me how

1601
01:17:38,880 --> 01:17:41,840
Speaker 2: to think about change in a very detailed and complex way.

1602
01:17:42,640 --> 01:17:44,080
Speaker 2: And I owe a lot of my career to him,

1603
01:17:44,120 --> 01:17:44,400
Speaker 2: I think.

1604
01:17:44,960 --> 01:17:48,320
Speaker 1: And since you mentioned books, let's talk about what you're

1605
01:17:48,360 --> 01:17:50,360
Speaker 1: reading now and what are some of your favorites.

1606
01:17:51,360 --> 01:17:54,280
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I read a lot of fiction and nonfiction both.

1607
01:17:54,920 --> 01:17:58,400
Speaker 2: There's a nonfiction book I highly recommend called Beyond Measure

1608
01:17:58,479 --> 01:18:00,680
Speaker 2: by James Vincent, and it really does dovetail with some

1609
01:18:00,720 --> 01:18:03,360
Speaker 2: of the ideas we've been talking about. It's a history

1610
01:18:03,400 --> 01:18:06,120
Speaker 2: of measurement, and this is a perfect example of what

1611
01:18:06,120 --> 01:18:08,040
Speaker 2: I talked about with Locke in because the sort of

1612
01:18:08,040 --> 01:18:12,240
Speaker 2: way that we subdivide the world is often completely arbitrary.

1613
01:18:12,320 --> 01:18:14,720
Speaker 2: So much of America, by the way, is arranged the

1614
01:18:14,720 --> 01:18:16,760
Speaker 2: way it is because of a thing called the Gunter's chain,

1615
01:18:17,040 --> 01:18:19,200
Speaker 2: which is why city blocks are arranged the way they are.

1616
01:18:19,240 --> 01:18:22,559
Speaker 2: It's this arbitrary measure to try to subdivide land in

1617
01:18:22,600 --> 01:18:25,679
Speaker 2: a way that was standardized. So yeah, Beyond Measures very good.

1618
01:18:26,360 --> 01:18:29,719
Speaker 2: I love Kurt Vonnegut as a novelist. He's book Cat's

1619
01:18:29,720 --> 01:18:32,360
Speaker 2: Cradle and Sirens of Titan are my two favorite novels,

1620
01:18:32,360 --> 01:18:35,120
Speaker 2: along with Douglas Adams's work, Hey Checker's Guide to the Galaxy.

1621
01:18:35,160 --> 01:18:36,599
Speaker 2: So I can't recommend all of those enough.

1622
01:18:37,960 --> 01:18:40,880
Speaker 1: It's funny because when you're talking about the various things

1623
01:18:40,880 --> 01:18:45,000
Speaker 1: that change history, I'm normally not a big fan of

1624
01:18:45,040 --> 01:18:49,000
Speaker 1: the revisionist history. But Man in the High Castle by

1625
01:18:49,040 --> 01:18:52,240
Speaker 1: Philip K. Dick, What happens if the US loses World

1626
01:18:52,280 --> 01:18:54,880
Speaker 1: War Two and Japan and Germany take over the world?

1627
01:18:55,560 --> 01:19:01,720
Speaker 1: Fascinating book, along Thost similar concepts, and our final two questions.

1628
01:19:02,040 --> 01:19:05,000
Speaker 1: What sort of advice would you give a recent college

1629
01:19:05,080 --> 01:19:10,679
Speaker 1: grad interested in a career in either political science or writing.

1630
01:19:11,360 --> 01:19:14,200
Speaker 2: It's fine. I do give advice to people who are

1631
01:19:14,200 --> 01:19:16,400
Speaker 2: about to graduate all the time, and what I always

1632
01:19:16,400 --> 01:19:19,000
Speaker 2: tell them is to try things out. I mean, the

1633
01:19:19,040 --> 01:19:24,280
Speaker 2: period of exploration in the twenties is one where I

1634
01:19:24,360 --> 01:19:27,240
Speaker 2: think people end up much happier if they sort of

1635
01:19:27,240 --> 01:19:29,640
Speaker 2: do a trial and error approach, realize what works for

1636
01:19:29,680 --> 01:19:32,320
Speaker 2: them what doesn't work for them. My brother always used

1637
01:19:32,360 --> 01:19:34,519
Speaker 2: to say that the most important internship he ever had

1638
01:19:34,560 --> 01:19:37,560
Speaker 2: was the one he hated the most, because he realized

1639
01:19:37,960 --> 01:19:39,599
Speaker 2: he thought he wanted to be a geneticist. He got

1640
01:19:39,640 --> 01:19:43,000
Speaker 2: this like plumb post as a researcher on fig wasps

1641
01:19:43,040 --> 01:19:46,559
Speaker 2: of all things, hated every minute of it. Now he's

1642
01:19:46,560 --> 01:19:49,000
Speaker 2: a doctor and loves it. But it was because he

1643
01:19:49,080 --> 01:19:51,519
Speaker 2: listened to that feedback in his own experience and said

1644
01:19:51,560 --> 01:19:53,760
Speaker 2: you know this is not for me, so you know,

1645
01:19:54,000 --> 01:19:57,800
Speaker 2: really go out try things and take notes about what

1646
01:19:57,840 --> 01:19:59,000
Speaker 2: you like and what you don't like, and then that

1647
01:19:59,000 --> 01:19:59,960
Speaker 2: will help you make better decison.

1648
01:20:00,479 --> 01:20:03,040
Speaker 1: And our final question, what do you know about the

1649
01:20:03,080 --> 01:20:09,160
Speaker 1: world of chaos, theory, causation, the butterfly effect today you

1650
01:20:09,200 --> 01:20:11,080
Speaker 1: wish you knew twenty or so years ago.

1651
01:20:12,120 --> 01:20:13,920
Speaker 2: Well, I like, you know, one of the things is

1652
01:20:13,960 --> 01:20:16,000
Speaker 2: that I'm derived from mass murder, because I didn't know

1653
01:20:16,040 --> 01:20:18,880
Speaker 2: that previously, but I will say that, you know, I

1654
01:20:18,880 --> 01:20:21,160
Speaker 2: think that navigating uncertainty is one of those things that

1655
01:20:21,200 --> 01:20:24,800
Speaker 2: I used to think was only something that we should

1656
01:20:24,800 --> 01:20:28,040
Speaker 2: try to slay and tame. What I like to appreciate now,

1657
01:20:28,080 --> 01:20:29,640
Speaker 2: and I write about some of the philosophy of this

1658
01:20:29,720 --> 01:20:31,960
Speaker 2: in fluke is. I actually think uncertainty can be a

1659
01:20:31,960 --> 01:20:35,559
Speaker 2: really wonderful thing, and you just have to sometimes accept

1660
01:20:35,600 --> 01:20:38,880
Speaker 2: it and then navigate based on the understanding that there

1661
01:20:38,960 --> 01:20:42,880
Speaker 2: is radical uncertainty that we can't eliminate, and that is

1662
01:20:42,920 --> 01:20:45,879
Speaker 2: where some of the best flukes in life come from.

1663
01:20:45,920 --> 01:20:49,200
Speaker 1: Really very fascinating. Thank you, Brian for being so generous

1664
01:20:49,200 --> 01:20:52,479
Speaker 1: with your time. We have been speaking with Brian Klass,

1665
01:20:52,720 --> 01:20:56,839
Speaker 1: Professor of Global Politics at University College London and author

1666
01:20:56,920 --> 01:21:00,439
Speaker 1: of the new book Fluke, Chance, Chaos and Why Everything

1667
01:21:00,479 --> 01:21:04,280
Speaker 1: We Do Matters. If you enjoy this conversation, well be

1668
01:21:04,320 --> 01:21:07,120
Speaker 1: sure and check out any of the five hundred previous

1669
01:21:07,160 --> 01:21:10,000
Speaker 1: discussions we've had over the past ten years. You can

1670
01:21:10,040 --> 01:21:14,200
Speaker 1: find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your

1671
01:21:14,240 --> 01:21:18,479
Speaker 1: favorite podcast. Check out my new podcast at the Money

1672
01:21:18,960 --> 01:21:21,680
Speaker 1: once a week, a quick discussion with an expert on

1673
01:21:21,720 --> 01:21:25,719
Speaker 1: a subject that matters to investors. You can find those

1674
01:21:25,800 --> 01:21:28,840
Speaker 1: in the Masters of Business feed. Sign up for my

1675
01:21:28,960 --> 01:21:31,360
Speaker 1: daily reading list at ridults dot com. Follow me on

1676
01:21:31,400 --> 01:21:35,280
Speaker 1: Twitter at rit Alts. Follow the full family of Bloomberg

1677
01:21:35,520 --> 01:21:39,680
Speaker 1: podcasts at podcast I would be remiss if I did

1678
01:21:39,680 --> 01:21:42,360
Speaker 1: not thank the correct team that puts these conversations together

1679
01:21:42,439 --> 01:21:45,840
Speaker 1: each week. Kaylie Lapara is my audio engineer, A Tick

1680
01:21:45,880 --> 01:21:49,960
Speaker 1: of Albrun is my project manager, Sean Russo is my researcher,

1681
01:21:50,080 --> 01:21:53,720
Speaker 1: and A Luke is my producer. I'm Barry Hults. You've

1682
01:21:53,720 --> 01:21:58,840
Speaker 1: been listening to Masters and Business on Bloomberg Radio.